If you devoted your life to the contemplation of disaster, then wasn’t an incident-free existence an empty one?

Awfulness can happen at any time. That’s what’s so awful.

You know, in the Soviet Union they used to have a tradition of ordering scientists to change their studies to conform with the ideology then acceptable to the state. And scientists in the rest of the world found that laughable as well as tragic.

Nearly everything we understand about global warming was understood in 1979.

I try to write 1,000 words. Some people say it's not about the quantity but about the quality. I disagree. You need to write a lot in order to figure out what's good and what's crap.

In my experience, scientists are not always the most socially adjusted people, and may have habits and fascinations outside of their work that others might consider odd.

I studied literature and Italian at Yale. I wrote my thesis about Italo Svevo, one of my heroes.

Criticism always seemed to me a lot like police work. You look for clues, fingerprints, motives. You need to construct an airtight case.

There is something fascinating about every human being. The question is how much they're willing to divulge.

I live in New Orleans, because it's the strangest city in the United States. It has the highest murder rate in the country, the highest incarceration rate, and often we have to boil our drinking water, but there's nowhere else remotely like it.