America is a very seductive place in terms of lifestyle and comfort, but it wasn't for me.

Of all the things I am not very good at, living in the real world is perhaps the most outstanding.

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.

Our instinct may be to see the impossibility of tracking everything down as frustrating, dispiriting, perhaps even appalling, but it can just as well be viewed as almost unbearably exciting. We live on a planet that has a more or less infinite capacity to surprise. What reasoning person could possibly want it any other way?

As a rule of thumb, I would submit that if you need to call your floss provider, for any reason, you are probably not ready for this level of oral hygiene.

Traveling is more fun - hell, life is more fun - if you can treat it as a series of impulses.

Not writing the same kind of book over and over again is to me the real pleasure of what I do.