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.

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.

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.

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.

No one presumes to teach an art that he has not first mastered through study. How foolish therefore for the inexperienced to assume pastoral authority when the care of souls is the art of arts.

I miss him so badly it hurts.

...it isn’t things and proximity, or even blood that holds us all together. What makes a family is love and loyalty.

Every individual alive today, even the very highest, is to be derived in an unbroken line from the first and lowest forms.

Any manwhose love of horses isstronger thanhis fear of being an absurdity is all right with me.

Now, look, baby, 'Union' is spelled with 5 letters. It is not a four-letter word.

All I can do is lie here, brain turning somersaults. It's nights like these when memories stir, whipping themselves into stiff peaks of pain.

But I couldn't cut that whole septic tank scene out because the audience liked it so much. So I sort of fell right back into getting a cheap laugh, but I still loved it.

I was always cast doing something athletic. I can't do a cartwheel.