The oldest principle of composition: repeat everything.

The loneliness of writing is that you baffle your friends and change the lives of strangers.

When you're sure of what you're looking at, look harder.

Science is not about control. It is about cultivating a perpetual condition of wonder in the face of something that forever grows one step richer and subtler than our latest theory about it. It is about reverence, not mastery.

My dream has always been to suspend myself in space when I write, and lying horizontal in bed is the closest to doing that.

Only white men have the luxury of ignoring race.

Evil is the refusal to see one's self in others.