So before I start work on a book, I'm like a pregnant mole - I obsessively tidy and order my closets and everything in my study. Because there's such a cascade of images and ideas that I'm grapping with mentally, I couldn't also be in a chaotic setting.

We are defined by how we place our attention.

We humans are obsessed with lights...Perhaps it is our way of hurling the constellations back at the sky.

Part of the irony of environmentalism is questing for solutions when you know you're part of the problem.

I think that very often younger writers don't appreciate how much hard work is involved in writing. The part of writing that's magic is the thinnest rind on the world of creation. Most of a writer's life is just work. It happens to be a kind of work that the writer finds fulfilling in the same way that a watchmaker can happily spend countless hours fiddling over the tiny cogs and bits of wire. ... I think the people who end up being writers are people who don't get bored doing that kind of tight focus in small areas.

It's animal by animal that you save a species.

The daftest logic brings such sweet unrest.