You know reviewers, they are the wind in their own sails.

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.

I know I'm a rare person, a trained scientist who writes fiction, because so few contemporary novelists engage with science.

That's how it is: some people are content to wait till you ask, while others jump right in with the whole story.

... Urban friends ask me how I can stand living here, 'so far from everything?' When I hear this question over the phone, I'm usually looking out the window at a forest, a running creek, and a vegetable garden, thinking: Define everything.

A certain feeling comes from throwing your good life away, and it is one part rapture.

A careless way of sauntering across the earth and breaking open its treasures, a terrible dependency on sucking out the world's best juices for ourselves-these may also be our enemies. The changes we dread most may contain our salvation.