“I appreciate the idea of the individual person battling the society – which is true in all his books.”

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 value my correspondence with writers…

I have too many friends who tell me that they spend the first hour of every morning going through their e-mail messages. I’d like to use my time more carefully.

It’s the journeyto get there. It’s a way of thinking and it’s an intellectual curiosity, a desire to know how the world works, and to know what the fundamental principles of the world are, and to know our place in it.