People ask without wanting to know.

animals behaved with purpose, it seemed. Unlike people.

Well, the ancients might not have been very heroic. Most of them were probably like Mother, crouched somewhere trying to work out how to make fake jawbone jewelry that would look like the real thing.

Everyone should get dirt on his hands each day. Doctors, intellectuals. Politicians, most of all. How can we presume to uplift the life of the working man, if we don't respect his work?

The happiest people are the ones with the most community.

People in my novels always have terrible problems. If they are not terrible, I make them more terrible.

What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.

Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.

Before that I was a scientist. I did research in population biology. And that's what I always go back to, it helps me to remember that people are not the end of the world, although we may be when it comes to it. We're just one species among millions in this world.