“Such is O’Brian’s power to possess the imagination that I found I was living in his world as much as my own, wanting to know what happens next.”

Brings [O’Brian’s] achievement to a new height.

Sublime Philosophy! Thou art the patriarch’s ladder, reaching heaven; And bright with beckoning angels but alas!.

Too much philosophy makes men mad.

I hear better with a pen in my hand.

That is the real test. Any contemporary novelist should recognize in Patrick O’Brian a Master of the Art.

Ants have the most complicated social organization on earth next to humans.

I never want to discontinue giving kids opportunities.

In many environments, take away the ants and there would be partial collapses in many of the land ecosystems.

Ants make up two-thirds of the biomass of all the insects. There are millions of species of organisms and we know almost nothing about them.

Ants are the leading removers of dead creatures on the land. And the rest of life is substantially dependent upon them.

People are not ants or bees. We do not reason or love or live or die collectively.

…all his longings came out as a kind of disdain for what he longed for.

I really knew I wanted to be Adam, because Adam was the first man. Ant I chose because, if there’s a nuclear explosion, the ants will survive.