The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains. Then man's new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. ...
Why should a novelist not also be a historian? To force unnatural divisions within the English language is to work against its capacious and accommodating nature. To expect a writer to produce only novels, or only histories, is equivalent to demandin...
I started wrestling at ten. I played a lot of other sports: soccer, football. I really enjoyed skiing. But wrestling just took off for me. It seemed to be the sport I had an affinity for; I liked the individual, combative nature. There's something sp...
In school, you learn that there are only seven kinds of stories. There's man versus nature, man versus man, man versus himself, blah blah blah. So it doesn't matter what they're called. It's this: do you have a new story that fits into one of those t...
The earth is such a voluminous, sparse, wild place that has its own rhythm that human beings try to control and strategize our way around, but the truth is, if you're out someplace like the ocean on a capsized boat, it doesn't matter if you have acad...
My poems always begin with a metaphor, but my way into the metaphor may be a word, an image, even a sound. And I rarely know the nature of the metaphor when I begin to write, but there is an attentiveness that a writer develops, a sudden alertness th...
China's headlong rush to industrialize was pursued with the most Marxist of prejudices - bending nature to man's will. That's a desperately hard trick to pull off when one fifth of humanity, having previously subsisted on 7 percent of the world's fre...
As a very small boy, my passion was nature, and I had pets - cats, a dog and a bunny rabbit - and I wrote a very small book called 'My Pets,' filled with their photographs and a discussion about my pets and how much I loved them... That was my first ...
When you say 'control freak' and 'OCD' and 'organized,' that suggests someone who's cold in nature, and I'm just not. Like, I'm really open when it comes to letting people in. But I just like my house to be neat, and I don't like to make big messes t...
Each of us has a very rich nature and can look at things objectively, from a distance, and at the same time can have something more personal to say about them. I am trying to look at the world, and at myself, from many different points of view. I thi...
At least in part, people are attracted to subjects where they can identify at a basic level with the people who do it. The extraordinary aesthetic of the natural world is not obvious to someone who never leaves the inner city. Appreciation of the ele...
When you're younger, you see the people who are in power and think they must have that position because of some degree of skill. And as you get older, you realize it's not true, that most people in those positions are absolutely inept. And this natur...
Often, economists spend their energies squabbling with one another, but arguably the more important contrast is between our broadly liberal economic worldview and the various alternatives - common around the globe - that postulate natural hierarchies...
I've always loved science, as far back as I can remember. I was very, very curious about how everything worked: the world, the physical universe, chemistry, law. So it was only natural to be curious about how our mind works.
Ten years ago, I still feared loss enough to abandon myself in order to keep things stable. I'd smile when I was sad, pretend to like people who appalled me. What I now know is that losses aren't cataclysmic if they teach the heart and soul their nat...
I once drove a pair of horses from New York to Vicksburg, and to this day I can almost map out that country as I saw it then, with its hills and valleys, villages and rivers. Yes, I naturally attribute something of my success in railroad building to ...
I sleep 75 percent of all plane trips I take. I love red-eyes from West to East. I take Ambien to make sure I sleep. I always stay on West Coast time, and I'm always so fried when I come back, I usually sleep naturally.
It has been said, by engineers themselves, that given enough money, they can accomplish virtually anything: send men to the moon, dig a tunnel under the English Channel. There's no reason they couldn't likewise devise ways to protect infrastructure f...
Men like to provide for women and their families. It's in their DNA. I'm obviously no scientist, but I bet if you could hear a Y-chromosome talk, it would say, 'I want to provide and hunt.' When the woman is the primary breadwinner, it's going agains...
I've always been slightly hesitant about generalizing movies made by men and women being different in their nature; I think movies by each director are different. Having said that, I think that it's kind of disgraceful that there aren't more female d...
I read a lot; fiction and non-fiction are the mediums I find most edifying and inspiring. I watch movies and listen to music and take lots and lots of walks. Nature is a nice reset button for me, it's how I get a lot of thinking done.
