Islands are where species go to die.

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.

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.

To failure at something is an attempt to succeed. Be strong and try again.

Desire is a great virtue, but expectation is an even greater vice.

As a mother, the one thing that always goes through your head is, You're never enough. You never can be enough - or do enough - for your kids. It's a never-ending issue for me.

On tour, its either call ex-boyfriends or tweet a lot. Youre just looking for any proof that youre not completely alone.

Spies are the ears and eyes of Princes.

They don't know it, but they are doing it.

Support your libraries... or else!

Being pro-life is an essential part of being a writer.

The use of plant oil as fuel may seem insignificant today. But such products can in time become just as important as kerosene and these coal-tar-products of today.

I think people enjoy a series. When you like a story, many readers want more of the same, which is dandy, if the author and the characters have more to say.