Chimpanzees are endangered. Severely.

So the same cultural and political issues that divided us in 1968 are still dividing us.

A couple of years I taught in graduate programs at NYU and Columbia, in the early eighties.

Storytelling is an ancient and honorable act. An essential role to play in the community or tribe. It's one that I embrace wholeheartedly and have been fortunate enough to be rewarded for.

Motivations are too tangled and complex.

And out of a desire essentially to imitate what I was reading, I began to write, like a clever monkey.

The United States particularly abandoned Liberia after the end of the Cold War.

I much prefer working with kids whose life could be completely upended by a reading of a book over a weekend. You give them a book to read - they go home and come back a changed person. And that is so much more interesting and exciting.

Although I still occasionally paint and draw, my life has now been shaped by my writing.

The best thing about writing programs is that it rationalized the apprenticeship of a writer.

Nobody does anything for one reason.

My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to history.

Lists of books we reread and books we can't finish tell more about us than about the relative worth of the books themselves.

Through writing, through that process, they realize that they become more intelligent, and more honest and more imaginative than they can be in any other part of their life.

Chimpanzees are endangered. Severely.

But on the other hand, I don't actively seek out stories or hunt them down.

I began as a boy with artistic talent... as a visual artist... I thought that was what I'd become and in my late teens drifted into reading serious literature.

It's hard to spend years at a time working in total solitude with no reality-check.

But really, it was reading that led me to writing. And in particular, reading the American classics like Twain who taught me at an early age that ordinary lives of ordinary people can be made into high art.

First of all it's usually women who run these higher primate sanctuaries, rarely men. They are white. They come from privileged backgrounds. They are educated.

For almost anyone who chooses to be a writer, since so very few writers are able to learn a living from their work that is equivalent to the living earned by the average dentist or accountant.

I don't want it to be all that self-conscious or artificial, but it really grows out of my having invented myself as a listener so that I could hear her voice.

One of the things I have tried to do with this book and with all of them really is avoid that simple, easy, reductionist view of motivation and to show we do things for a complex net of reasons, a real braid of reasons.

If you dedicate your attention to discipline in your life you become smarter while you are writing than while you are hanging out with your pals or in any other line of work.

What I am finding now is that my audience is getting younger as I get older, which is a very good thing as you know - you don't want them to get older as you get older.

John Brown first swam into my vision in the 1960s when I was a political activist in the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement at Chapel Hill, where I went to university.

And there are people who want to be writers because they love to write. And they care.

The 60s passed and faded and I grew older, and in 1987 bought a house in upstate New York, and it turned out that John Brown was buried down the road from my house and that he had lived there longer than anywhere else and his house was still standing.

We cannot all succeed when half of us are held back.

Designing was an effortless exercise and something I always enjoyed.

Surfactants allow us to protect a water surface and to generate these beautiful soap bubbles, which are the delight of our children.

I think I have got a very good sense of humour; other people don't, but I do. I also laugh at my own jokes.

I never set out to be weird. It was always the other people who called me weird.

I'm part of a party that I think values making sure that everyone in this country has an opportunity to succeed. That's why I'm a Democrat.

There is no good in arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat.

The best things in life are free. The second best things are very very expensive.

If you have easy self-contentment, you might have a very, very cheap source of happiness.

I love books so much. I've read more books than anyone else I know.

There's a lot of movies that aren't all about Christmas, or where Christmas isn't the focus, but have that spirit of Christmas in them. I love that sequence in 'Auntie Mame,' where she's in the department store, sewing at Macy's, and she doesn't know how to do anything but fill out a form as 'cash on delivery!'

Because I have moderated two general election debates - in 2004 and 2008 - I know better than to carp from the sidelines. I am confident in my accomplishment of having had Queen Latifah portray me on 'Saturday Night Live' both years.

Making checklists of things you're looking for in a person is the numero uno thing you can do to guarantee you'll be alone forever.

Once the Xerox copier was invented, diplomacy died.

No, I was talking to the network and Universal about plans for a third season where Buck would go back to Earth and would focus on stories around the planet and show what it was like 500 years later.

Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf.

Marketing used to be about advertising, and advertising is expensive. Today, marketing is about engaging with the tribe and delivering products and services with stories that spread.

The future battle on the ground will be preceded by battle in the air. This will determine which of the contestants has to suffer operational and tactical disadvantages and be forced throughout the battle into adoption compromise solutions.

So by the time I taught myself the bass guitar at the age of 14, my hands were already pretty nimble.

Deep down a broken heart all the sadness one can bear is misery.

And they that rule in England, in stately conclaves met, alas, alas for England they have no graves as yet.