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.

The swallow that hibernates underwater is a creature called yearning.

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.

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

the holiest place on earth is where an ancient hatred has become apresent love.

Don’t write like your mentors

I don't do the gym and I don't diet. I'm vegetarian but I don't diet.

Every single Pixar film, at one time or another, has been the worst movie ever put on film. But we know. We trust our process. We don't get scared and say, 'Oh, no, this film isn't working.'

The only thing worth globalizing is dissent.

Something happens when you feel ownership. You no longer act like a spectator or consumer, because you're an owner. Faith is at its best when it's that way too. It's best lived when it's owned.

The very first word out of Jesus; mouth in is ministry in the New Testament is clear: repent.

The lovers of life, they are children at heart always in their wonder and delight, but they do not grab.

Why do people shush animals? Theyve never spoken

Every project for me is a risk that I bet on. I believe my senses, and hopefully it will be successful. But sometimes you make it, and sometimes you fail.