My notion of a great novel is something like a five-hundred-page shaggy-dog story, with only the punch line omitted.

Motherhood is an essential, difficult, and full-time job. Women who do not wish to be mothers should not have babies.

Running the big rapids is like sex: half the fun lies in the anticipation. Two thirds of the thrill with the approach. The remainder is only ecstasy-or darkness.

When the biggest, richest, glassiest buildings in town are the banks, you know that town's in trouble.

Humankind will not be free until the last Kremlin commissar is strangled with the entrails of the last Pentagon chief of staff.

Simply because humankind have the power now to meddle or 'manage' or 'exercise stewardship' in every nook and cranny of the world does not mean that we have a right to do so. Even less, the obligation.

A world without huge regions of total wilderness would be a cage; a world without lions and tigers and vultures and snakes and elk and bison would be - will be - a human zoo. A high-tech slum.