“Each person knows that somewhere is recorded the moment she was born, the moment she took her first step, the moment of her first passion, the moment she said goodbye to her parents.”

We have a house on a very tiny island in Maine. Which is really my spiritual center. We’ve been going there for ten years, and it has no ferry service, no bridges, no telephone service. It’s really isolated.

I have a number of vague ideas where I just have the core or kernel of the idea. I feel like I need some time for my mind to fill up again. I feel empty. Right now.

I love staying in written correspondence with some writers. That’s enough for me.

Except for a God who sits down after the universe begins, all other gods conflict with the assumptions of science.

They came back to the nest in the middle of April. They take separate vacations in the winter – the mother and father.

They would rather have an eternity of contentment, even if that eternity were fixed and frozen, like a butterfly mounted in a case.

We often do not see what we do not expect to see.

One day I’m going to write a book about osprey. It has really gotten deep into my bloodstream. So when you ask what else I do, I feel like this is part of what I do….is to watch these birds.

It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning, each touch has no past or no future, each kiss is a kiss of immediacy.

I oppose any belief that contradicts experimental evidence as determined by the methods of science.

In short, the body is a machine, subject to the same laws of electricity and mechanics as an electron or clock.

Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.

I also like the magic realist writers, such as Borges and Marquez, and feel that interesting truths can be learned about our world by exploring highly distorted worlds.

With a background in science I am extremely interested in the meeting ground of science, theology, and philosophy, especially the ethical questions at the border of science and theology.

You make one good shot and it brings you back the next time. With writing a long book there has to be at least one bit that has some magic in it that you can go back to.

If you think about fiction writing as a spectrum, where at one end of the spectrum in the infrared, are the story tellers, and the people for whom creation of wonderful characters and telling a good story is the most important thing.

I am sorry we promoted sexual orientation change efforts and reparative theories about sexual orientation that stigmatized parents.

I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I’m homosexual.

Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.

I’ve been lucky enough to live through all the things that are supposed to give meaning to our lives, like parenting, grandparenting, art, celebrity.

As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.

When I was 12, I forgot the keys to my parent’s apartment. So I simply climbed up seven floors to get in.

The good parent: someone who doesn’t mind, for a time, being hated by their children.

I believe in the right of every parent to choose whether his child shall be educated in the public school or in a religious school supported by those of his own faith.