We should preserve every scrap of biodiversity as priceless while we learn to use it and come to understand what it means to humanity.

The two major challenges for the 21st century are to improve the economic situation of the majority and save as much of the planet as we can.

In some ways, I had a traditional 'old South' upbringing, meaning that I spent some time in a military school, and acquired an inoculum of the military ethic that is still with me today: honor, duty, loyalty.

Humanity, in the desperate attempt to fit 8 billion or more people on the planet and give them a higher standard of living, is at risk of pushing the rest of life off the globe.

I had reached a point in my career in which I was ready to try something new in my writing, and the idea of a novel has always been in the back of my mind.

We've got paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technologies.

The brain and its satellite glands have now been probed to the point where no particular site remains that can reasonably be supposed to harbour a nonphysical mind.