So research is a terribly imperfect science, and you learn an awful lot more after you've published a book, because people keep writing to you and sa….

To be perfectly honest the old habits, specifically deadlines, still very much inform what I do. I am brutally disciplined about getting manuscripts ….

Any grand new dictionary ought itself to be a democratic product, a book that demonstrated the primacy of individual freedoms, of the notion that one….

We associate the North Atlantic with cod. The motto of Newfoundland used to be 'In cod we trust.' It was a joke, but it was essentially true. But the….

Millions upon millions of people came here full of hope and aspiration to this extraordinary land of liberty and opportunity, and helped build the Un….

I don't hero worship for the sake of hero worship. When I find people who are truly remarkable - and I think Joseph Needham is a classic example - I ….

I find the science behind major natural events almost more interesting than the way in which those same events wreak their effects on human society..

I've come to accept who my readers turn out to be, rather than having some sort of demographic target..

All of those broken bones in northern Japan, all of those broken lives and those broken homes prompt us to remember what in calmer times we are invar….

Nature is not evil. The world occasionally shrugs its shoulders, and people get knocked off. The earth, for geological reasons that are well known, i….

Nothing is eternally stable, and even Kansas isn't really in Kansas anymore. The earth is in a constant state of flux..

I do as much bookish research as I can but when I sit down to write, often I think, 'Wait, I was there.' That is one of the great advantages of havin….

The nature of catastrophe is, after all, reasonably unvarying in the way it ruins, destroys, wounds and devastates. But if something can be learned f….

Why do we as a people choose to live in beautiful and risky places? Beautiful places are relatively dangerous; the forces that made them beautiful ar….

We should all live in central or southwest Queensland in Australia, which is geologically stable. Or Kansas or Nebraska, because it's relatively geol….

We kid ourselves that we're trying to be empathetic with the human condition from a distance, but I don't think that is it at all. It's stupid; it's ….

Having been in the newspaper business for a long, long time, I often wonder, Why do we actually need to know about something like a bus crash in Bang….

The most difficult task for anyone wandering through a foreign land with the hope of gaining some insight into it is the profound need to come to ter….

My wife is very interested in fashion. I am absolutely not. I couldn't give a toss. Fashion is a perfectly valid thing to be interested in. I'm just ….

I think they will never really enjoy true democracy in China..