As a biologist, I can't think of myself as anything but an animal among animals and plant.

Feeling that morality has nothing to do with the way you use the resources of the world is an idea that can't persist much longer. If it does, then we won't.

If someone does learn about the world from reading a novel of mine, that makes me very happy. It's probably not what brings me into the novel in the first place - I usually am pulled in by some big question about the world and human nature that I'm not going to resolve in the course of the novel. But I'm very devoted to getting my facts straight.

I grew up aware of all the people I depended on and who depended on me.

I know people. Most have no earthly notion of the price of a snow-white conscience.

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.

A woman knows she can walk away from a pot to tend something else and the pot will go on boiling; if she couldn't this world would end at once.