Writing a book is a bit like going on location for a movie. You're absent from your life, your family, and your friends. You're psychologically gone, so you might as well be physically gone.

Welcome...to Jurassic Park!

Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.

The extreme positions of the Crossfire Syndrome require extreme simplification - framing the debate in terms which ignore the real issues.

Let's be clear. The planet is not in jeopardy. We are in jeopardy. We haven't got the power to destroy the planet - or to save it. But we might have the power to save ourselves.

Books aren't written - they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it.

You think you can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. . . . . We've been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we're gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us.

Life is wonderful. It's a gift to be alive, to see the sun and breathe the air. And there isn't really anything else.

It's better to die laughing than to live each moment in fear.

Do you know what we call opinion in the absence of evidence? We call it prejudice.

Social control is best managed through fear.

While the whole world was asleep, the caterpillar was awake, working towards becoming a butterfly.

There's no such thing as fiction", Annie told him once. "If you can imagine something, then it's happened.

Commitment leads to action. Action brings your dream closer.

Rules for Happiness: something to do, someone to love, something to hope for.

As an inclusive quality, imagination is thus our primary force for progress, whatever progress is.

It's one of those secrets that's embarrassing to acknowledge, but we do love our students.

Women more than men can strip war of its glamour and its out-of-date heroisms and patriotisms, and see it as a demon of destruction and hideous wrong.

How could any of us truly appreciate our lives if we had nothing else to compare them to?

One life was never quite enough for what I had in mind.

I don't feel comfortable with luxury, and I try to stay fairly normal.