I wrote four novels, but then I realized that the world didn't need me to be a novelist, but the world could use me as a nonfiction writer.

The swallow that hibernates underwater is a creature called yearning.

The elk are the most abundant large herbivores in the Yellowstone ecosystem. There are thousands and thousands of them. They migrate in and out. And those migration routes need to stay open.

Nor are we the culmination of evolution, except in the sense that there has never been another species so bizarrely ingenious that it could create both iambic pentameter and plutonium.

Identity is such a crucial affair that one shouldn't rush into it.

By the cold Darwinian logic of natural selection, evolution codifies happenstance into strategy.

Islands are havens and breeding grounds for the unique and anomalous. They are natural laboratories of extravagant evolutionary experimentation.

Among the earliest forms of human self-awareness was the awareness of being meat.

If you are lying in a tent in the Congo jungle, you don't want to be reading about rainforest biology. You want to be in a distant world.

Mathematics to me is like a language I don’t speak though I admire its literature in translation.

I used to read only fiction. Now I don't read much, only occasionally, such as a Cormac McCarthy or a Jim Harrison novel.

And, they would still be alive today...If they hadn't died, that is

We're still in the first minutes of the first day of the Internet revolution.

You can't get a movie made without a script; it's the blueprint to your building.

I'm a bluesman moving through a blues-soaked America, a blues-soaked world, a planet where catastrophe and celebration - joy and pain - sit side by side.

Our current perception is very cloudy and all screwed up. As our perception increases through meditation, we're seeing life more correctly.

The gap between verse and poetry is enormous. Between good poetry and good prose the gap is much narrower

A man is most accurately judged by how he treats those who are not in a position either to retaliate or to reciprocate.

I always wanted to kind of make the listener feel like it was them that I was talking about, or to the point that I could say the rhyme, and feel like it's them saying it.

God will not punish the man Who makes return for an injury.

I'm not a Jesus freak, I'm not a satan worshipper. I'm a contradiction, a juxtaposition.