Nature can put on a thrilling show. The stage is vast, the lighting is dramatic, the extras are innumerable, and the budget for special effects is absolutely unlimited.

Scientists are a friendly, atheistic, hard-working, beer-drinking lot whose minds are preoccupied with sex, chess and baseball when they are not preoccupied with science.

I love Canada...It is a great country much too cold for good sense, inhabited by compassionate, intelligent people with bad hairdos.

There are animals we haven't stopped by. Don't think they're harmless. Life will defend itself no matter how small it is.

I meet a number of people as a writer of fiction who say "Oh, I don't read much fiction," as if the history of the United States, just as an example, isn't an exercise in storytelling and myth-making.

In art, something comes of nothing. Out of the thin air and the ether, you create a story. And that is intensely satisfying.

When your own life is threatened, your sense of empathy is blunted by a terrible, selfish hunger for survival.