If a building looks better under construction than it does when finished, then it's a failure.

I find it hard to believe that human beings are the crowning achievement of life on earth. Something better than us has to come along.

In the old days people had far fewer channels in which to place their imaginative time. There's definitely more competition for time . . . and yet people seem to be reading [books] as much.

Mom said that people are interested in birds only in as much as they exhibit human behavior - greed and stupidity and anger - and by doing so they free us from the unique sorrow of being human...I told Mom my own theory of why we like birds - of how birds are a miracle because they prove to us there is a finer, simpler state of being which we may strive to attain.

It'd be preposterous for me to propose a universal cure to loneliness but I will say that people who do the things they find interesting, either creatively or vocationally, tend to become unlonely very quickly.

What is prayer but a wish for the events in your life to string together to form a story -- something that makes some sense of events you know have meaning.

If cats were double the size they are now, they'd probably be illegal.