Things hardly ever work on the first try. We'll make another, a better one.

Invisible Beasts is a strange and beautiful meditation on love and seeing, a hybrid of fantasy and field guide, novel and essay, treatise and fable. With one hand it offers a sad commentary on environmental degradation, while with the other it presents a bright, whimsical, and funny exploration of what it means to be human. It's wonderfully written, crazily imagined, and absolutely original.

Don’t you want to be alive before you die?

Watching teething babies is like watching over a thermonuclear reactor-it is best done in shifts, by well-rested people.

I write reviews of science books for the Boston Globe, so I like to give science books.

I've been getting into Nick Drake lately, the folk singer. Sad, gorgeous stuff.

Here's what I mean by the miracle of language. When you're falling into a good book, exactly as you might fall into a dream, a little conduit opens, a passageway between a reader's heart and a writer's, a connection that transcends the barriers of continents and generations and even death ... And here's the magic. You're different. You can never go back to being exactly the same person you were before you disappeared into that book.