Islands are havens and breeding grounds for the unique and anomalous. They are natural laboratories of extravagant evolutionary experimentation.

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.

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.

You can never live in the past. You always live in the tiny gap between the present and the future.

I wanted to be dead. No. That's not quite right. I didn't want to be dead, I just didn't want to be alive.

Life is not a series of pathetic, meaningles actions. Some of them are so far from pathetic, so far from meaningless as to be beyond reason, maybe beyond forgiveness.

It is really an alienation to believe that learning is the result of teaching.

I don't know if it's a good idea to give a woman a box of bullets when she's got a pimple.

Southern barbecue is the closest thing we have in the US to Europe’s wines or cheeses; drive a hundred miles and the barbecue changes.

Music in general is looking for something new overall.

Any rule, not existing in the nature of things, or that is not permanent, universal and inflexible in its application, is no law, according to any correct definition of the term law.

I do yoga. I do tai chi. I do a lot to keep my body and my spirit together so I can work.

For [the] quick in wit and light in manners be either seldom troubled or very soon weary, in carrying a very heavy purse.