Four times I was honked at for having the temerity to proceed through town without the benefit of metal.

I don't know whether I'm misanthropic. It seems to me I'm constantly disappointed. I'm very easily disappointed.

The average Southerner has the speech patterns of someone slipping in and out of consciousness. I can change my shoes and socks faster than most people in Mississippi can speak a sentence.

Out of the thirty thousand types of edible plants thought to exist on Earth, just eleven—corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, cassava, sorghum, millet, beans, barley, rye, and oats—account for 93 percent of all that humans eat, and every one of them was first cultivated by our Neolithic ancestors.

I'm not funny in person. I mean I'm really not. I'm one of those people who always screw up anecdotes.

Disassemble the cells of a sponge (by passing them through a sieve, for instance), then dump them into a solution, and they will find their way back together and build themselves into a sponge again. You can do this to them over and over, and they will doggedly reassemble because, like you and me and every other living thing, they have one overwhelming impulse: to continue to be.

The whole of the global economy is based on supplying the cravings of two per cent of the world's population.