I don't hero worship for the sake of hero worship. When I find people who are truly remarkable - and I think Joseph Needham is a classic example - I do value their counsel.

The most difficult task for anyone wandering through a foreign land with the hope of gaining some insight into it is the profound need to come to terms with the lives and thoughts of strangers.

To be perfectly honest the old habits, specifically deadlines, still very much inform what I do. I am brutally disciplined about getting manuscripts in on time.

I find the science behind major natural events almost more interesting than the way in which those same events wreak their effects on human society.

Nothing is eternally stable, and even Kansas isn't really in Kansas anymore. The earth is in a constant state of flux.

I've come to accept who my readers turn out to be, rather than having some sort of demographic target.

I think they will never really enjoy true democracy in China.

You Keep Looking at what you want but you can’t have it, and once you have it it will never be the same. Sign of times

This curious world we inhabit is more wonderful than convenient

In the bush, trust no one you don't know.

Trying to pick individual stocks is a trap. I can't do it. Warren Buffett can, but hardly anyone else can beat the indexes over a long period of time.

Life is judged with all the blindness of life itself.

I'm paid to make an idiot out of myself. Why do you do it for free?

It's the end of the day where wives stay home and raise the kids and all that. That demeaning stuff? No more. Country club memberships, that's what you shoot for! To hell with that.

Health care for all Americans is the most pressing domestic issue today. It's far past time for the President and Congress to deliver health care to everyone.

The artist and the fundamentalist both confront the same issue, the mystery of their existence as individuals.

Where our joy is, there should our work be.