The job of a storyteller is to tell stories, and I have concentrated on that obligation.

It was the silent time before dawn, along the shores of what had been one of the most beautiful lakes in southern Africa.

No man leaves where he is and seeks a distant place unless he is in some respect a failure.

Every animal that walks the earth, or swims, or flies is precious beyond description, something so rare and wonderful that it equals the stars or the ocean or the mind of man.

We should be most careful about retreating from the specific challenge of our age. We should be reluctant to turn our back upon the frontier of this epoch... We cannot be indifferent to space, because the grand slow march of our intelligence has brought us, in our generation, to a point from which we can explore and understand and utilize it. To turn back now would be to deny our history, our capabilities.

On 24 October 1944 Planet Earth was following its orbit about the sun as it has obediently done for nearly five billion years.

I feel myself the inheritor of a great background of people. Just who, precisely, they were, I have never known. I might be part Negro, might be part Jew, part Muslim, part Irish. So I can't afford to be supercilious about any group of people because I may be that people.