The novelist screws up his courage in order to invest another two or three years in another attempt to float a boat of original design upon an invented ocean.

Man is different from animals in that he speculates, a high-risk activity.

Suicidal thinking, if serious, can be a kind of death scare, comparable to suffering a heart attack or undergoing a cancer operation. One survives such a phase both warier and chastened. When-ten years ago-I emerged from a bad dip into suicidal speculation, I felt utterly exhausted and yet quite fearless of ordinary dangers, vastly afraid of myself but much less scared of extraneous eventualities.

A mountain with a wolf on it stands a little taller.

We New Yorkers see more death and violence than most soldiers do, grow a thick chitin on our backs, grimace like a rat and learn to do a disappearing act. Long ago we outgrew the need to be blowhards about our masculinity; we leave that to the Alaskans and Texans, who have more time for it.

Indeed, if "biology is chemistry with history," as somebody has said, then nature writing is biology with love.

Animals are stylized characters in a kind of old saga - stylized because even the most acute of them have little leeway as they play out their parts.