"If we were to wipe out insects alone on this planet, the rest of life and humanity with it would mostly disappear from the land. Within a few months."

"Individual versus group selection results in a mix of altruism and selfishness, of virtue and sin, among the members of a society."

"Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction."

"So in my freshman year at the University of Alabama, learning the literature on evolution, what was known about it biologically, just gradually transformed me by taking me out of literalism and increasingly into a more secular, scientific view of the world."

"I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, 'Where's the self-help section?' She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose."

"The idea of capitalism is not just success but also the failure that allows success to happen."

"I really love idiot, enlightened characters - these characters who fail to engage with the drama of their immediate circumstances they fail to be reactive and enrolled by drama as it happens around them."

"There was my name up in lights. I said, 'God, somebody's made a mistake.' But there it was, in lights. And I sat there and said, 'Remember, you're not a star.' Yet there it was up in lights."