The point of going somewhere like the Napo River in Ecuador is not to see the most spectacular anything. It is simply to see what is there.

You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it... The vision is not so much destroyed, exactly, as it is, by the time you have finished, forgotten. It has been replaced by this changeling.

Caring passionately about something isn't against nature, and it isn't against human nature. It's what we're here to do.

Time is the warp and matter the weft of the woven texture of beauty in space, and death is the hurling shuttle.

I cannot imagine a sorrier pursuit than struggling for years to write a book that attempts to appeal to people who do not read in the first place.

I think the dying pray at the last not "please," but "thank you," as a guest thanks his host at the door.

I had been chipping at the world idly, and had by accident uncovered vast and labyrinthine further worlds within it.