“Nature is purposeless. Nature simply is. We may find nature beautiful or terrible, but those feelings are human constructions. Such utter and complete mindlessness is hard for us to accept.”

Scientists will forever have to live with the fact that their product is, in the end, impersonal.

Is anything so pure? Or is love, by its nature, a reciprocity, like oceans and clouds, an evaporating of seawater and a replenishing of rain?

We don’t have the time, literally, to think during the day. To listen to ourselves think. To think about where we are going, who we are, what’s important.

Another strand of my writing is the importance of the idea.

We walk from room to room, look into the room that is lit, the present moment, then walk on. We do not know the rooms ahead, but we know we cannot change them. We are spectators of our lives.

Everyone shares the same fate.

Their predictions become postdictions- Their equations become justifications, their logic, illogic.

And beyond any particular clock, a vast scaffold of time, stretching across the universe, lays down the law of time equally for all.

You say, “Something important really happened here. I really had hold of something I was visited by the muse.” And that’s enough to make you continue the months and years to finish the whole book.

All writers have roots they draw from – travel, work, family. My roots are in science and it is fertile ground for fiction.

Sexual arousal is no more than a flow of chemicals to certain nerve endings.

It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity.

I would bet most people don’t have thirty minutes in a day where they can just sit down and think. Or maybe they don’t have to be sitting, they can be walking.

It’s not necessarily a large number of people that affect the culture. You don’t count the number of influential voices, you weigh them. A hundred people can affect the culture.

The Book of Telling tells of a woman’s journey to uncover the secret life of her father and to find herself in the process.

If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.