A side benefit of the new and developing technologies is that soon we won't have to feel guilty about the suffering and denigration of the animals because we will have made them up.

For centuries poets, some poets, have tried to give a voice to the animals, and readers, some readers, have felt empathy and sorrow. If animals did have voices, and they could speak with the tongues of angels-at the very least with the tongues of angels-they would be unable to save themselves from us. What good would language do? Their mysterious otherness has not saved them, nor have their beautiful songs and coats and skins and shells and eyes.

Many writers today are wanderers. There is not only an unhousedness in language - how to convey, to say nothing of converge - but an unhousedness of place.

A writer starts out, I think, wanting to be a transfiguring agent, and ends up usually just making contact, contact with other human beings. This, unsurprisingly, is not enough.

You have never seen such animals as these who without a sound or a sign carry you off. You race with them across the long familiar ground that in that moment seems so glorious, so charged with beauty, strange. In their jaws you are carried so effortlessly, with such great care that you think it will never end, you long for it not to end, and then you wake and know that, indeed, they have not brought you back.

As you grow older, you'll find that you enjoy talking to strangers far more than to your friends.

There is a certain type of conversation one hears only when one is drunk and it is like a dream, full of humor and threat and significance, deep significance.