“That’s the fine balance of a fiction writer…to be able to give your characters enough freedom to surprise you and yet still maintain some kind of artistic control.”

Just didn’t know whether I would finish the book much less for it to come close to what I intended. I think that for any novel you never know exactly how the book is going to turn out…

I spend a lot of time just listening to the ospreys. I watch them go through their life cycle. They spend the winter in South America.

I think that the scienti?c way of looking at the world, and the humanistic way of looking at the world are complementary.

One metaphor for how we are living is that you see so may people with cell phones.

My second novel, “Good Benito”, was not finished. I wished that I had spent another year with it.

An unusual counterpoint between personal history and the history of a young nation. Haunting, powerful, and beautifully written.

While people can be doubted, time cannot be doubted. While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.

Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.

In this world, time has three dimensions, like space.

A good book changes for you every few years because you are in a different place in your own life. That’s a sign of a good novel.

Each future moves in a different direction of time. Each future is real.

Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they are rational but because the cosmos is irrational.

A book, especially a longer book, it’s a different kind of force that pushes you through it. It’s a vision of the whole thing.

Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum.

I consider myself an essayist and a fiction writer. In the essays, I certainly have been influenced by some of the leading science essayists. Like Loren Eiseley, Stephen Jay Gould, Lewis Thomas.

Suppose time is a circle, bending back on itself. The world repeats itself, precisely, endlessly.

We recommend for the training of teachers not only a considerable artistic education in general but special attention to the art of reading.

Any artist should be grateful for a naive grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

There can be no ‘graduated exercises in drawing’ leading up to an artistic creation. That goal can be attained only through the development of mechanical technique and through the freedom of the spirit.

Woodstock had a tremendous impact on American artistic life.

Very few people possess true artistic ability. It is therefore both unseemly and unproductive to irritate the situation by making an effort.

We don’t fight about music. We don’t fight about artistic direction.

Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.

Our photographs are filthier and our stories are more disgusting. We make no effort to be artistic.