Life is wonderful. It's a gift to be alive, to see the sun and breathe the air. And there isn't really anything else.

The experience of climbing Kilimanjaro affected me so powerfully that, for a long time afterward, if I caught myself saying, "I'm not a person who likes to do that activity, eat that food, listen to that music," I would automatically go out and do what I imagined I didn't like. Generally I found I was wrong about myself - I liked what I thought I wouldn't like. And even if I didn't like the particular experience, I learned I liked having new experiences.

He prays because he knows he doesn't control it. He's at the mercy of it.

Sometimes women scare the hell out of me.

You know what's wrong with scientific power? It's a form of inherited wealth. And you know what assholes congenitally rich people are.

This novel is fiction, except for the parts that aren't.

The past history of human belief is a cautionary tale. We have killed thousands of our fellow human beings because we believed they had signed a contract with the devil, and had become witches. We still kill more than a thousand people each year for witchcraft. In my view, there is only one hope for humankind to emerge from what Carl Sagan called "the demon-haunted world" of our past. That hope is science.