I love talking about nothing. It is the only thing I know anything about.

I love talking about nothing. It is the only thing I know anything about.

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, read more

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings.

We must go beyond textbooks, go out into the bypaths and untrodden depths of the wilderness and travel and explore read more

We must go beyond textbooks, go out into the bypaths and untrodden depths of the wilderness and travel and explore and tell the world the glories of our journey.

Language achieves soul only when it's applied as a tool, used by those who imbue it with what they have read more

Language achieves soul only when it's applied as a tool, used by those who imbue it with what they have had the courage and honesty to perceive and feel.

Writing is one of the few professions in which you can psychoanalyse yourself, get rid of hostilities and frustrations in read more

Writing is one of the few professions in which you can psychoanalyse yourself, get rid of hostilities and frustrations in public, and get paid for it

The problem with writing about religion is that you run the risk of offending sincerely religious people, and then they read more

The problem with writing about religion is that you run the risk of offending sincerely religious people, and then they come after you with machetes.

Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness

Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness

I write down everything I want to remember. That way, instead of spending a lot of time trying to remember read more

I write down everything I want to remember. That way, instead of spending a lot of time trying to remember what it is I wrote down, I spend the time looking for the paper I wrote it down on.

One writes to make a home for oneself, on paper, in time and in others' minds.

One writes to make a home for oneself, on paper, in time and in others' minds.