Poetry is a shuffling of boxes of illusions buckled with a strap of facts.
Today is not forever.
Maybe when I'm dead, I'll be forgiven, but I'm afraid I'll also be forgotten.
I used to go to church. I even went through a rather intense religious period when I was sixteen. But the idea of an everlasting life -- a never-ending banquet, as a stupid visiting minister to our church once appallingly described it -- filled me with a greater terror than the concept of extinction.
Perfection irritates as well as it attracts, in fiction as in life.
Only little boys and old men sneer at love.
Novels must have verisimilitude, and truth has little enough of that.
I feel more comfortable with gorillas than people. I can anticipate what a gorilla's going to do, and they're purely motivated.
Science as an intellectual exercise enriches our culture, and is in itself ennobling. . . . Though to the layman, the world revealed by the chemist may seem more commonplace, it is not so to him. Each new insight into how the atoms in their interactions express themselves in structure and transformations, not only of inanimate matter, but particularly also of living matter, provides a thrill.
Dominion does not mean domination. We hold dominion over animals only because of our powerful and ubiquitous intellect. Not because we are morally superior. Not because we have a "right" to exploit those who cannot defend themselves. Let us use our brain to move toward compassion and away from cruelty, to feel empathy rather than cold indifference, to feel animals' pain in our hearts.
I told my whole life story in my book.