“real beauty is so deep you have to move into darkness to understand it.”

I know of no restorative of heart, body, and soul more effective against hopelessness than the restoration of the Earth.

The wolf exerts a powerful influence on the human imagination. It takes your stare and turns it back on you

Throughout the centuries we have projected on to the wolf the qualities we most despise and fear in ourselves.

The interior landscape responds to the character and subtlety of the exterior landscape; the shape of the individual mind is affected by the land as it is by genes.

Would the last animal, eating garbage and living on the last scrap of land, his mate dead, would he still forgive you?

Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.

It is the imagination that gives shape to the universe.

People think that if you’ve written a book and somebody’s given you a pat on the back then, you know, it’s all – you’re all settled, you know? You’re going to be fine. I know that if I’m not confused, and really afraid, my work isn’t going to be any good.

My function as a writer is to provide an atmosphere in which people can think wisely about what we’re doing on this planet.

The most intelligent thing we can do is love, not reason.

One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse.

Have we come all this way, I wondered, only to be dismantled by our own technologies, to be betrayed by political connivance or the impersonal avarice of a corporation?

We cannot, of course, save the World because we do not have authority over its parts. We can serve the world though. That is everyone’s calling, to lead a life that helps.

Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.

When I sit at that typewriter, I have to be frightened of what I’m trying to do. I’m frightened by my own belief that I can actually get a story down on paper.

The writer works on the inside and the critic works on the outside. I don’t know what it looks like on the outside, sometimes. It’s not that I’m not interested-it’s not where I live. I live inside the story.

It’s very important to stretch, because while it’s good to look pumped

Usually, whatever’s in front of me is what I’m focused on and it’s 100% on that and then I kind of move from one thing to the next.

Any time I have an Internet connection, there’s a sluice of stuff moving into there, everything from beautiful rings to cockpit photos.

I had saved a few hundred photos of dodo skeletons into my ‘Creative Projects’ folder

Love changes us and helps us move forward in life.

It makes you feel really comfortable when someone is like, I’m not going to touch what you’re doing.

There must be some unwritten law that says about fifty people have to move into your house when somebody dies.

Do I really have moves like Jagger? F**king A, no, I don’t. But I was going to tell everybody that I did and hoped they believed me.