Quote

Every animal has his or her story, his or her thoughts, daydreams, and interests. All feel joy and love, pain and fear, as we now know beyond any shadow of a doubt. All deserve that the human animal afford them the respect of being cared for with great consideration for those interests or left in peace.

Humans have always used animals to depict ideas about themselves: ideas about their status, about their position in life and society and the world.

I think there is just a vein of humanity that really loves animals and really loves to read about them.

Human folk are as a matter of fact eager to find intelligence in animals.

Observing humans and observing oneself yields a clear-minded starting point for literature.

Only a literary work that reveals an unknown fragment of human existence has a reason for being.

I am a literary animal. For me, everything ends in literature.

We believed that to understand literature, you had to understand its place in history and culture.

To me, there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form - and local human passions and conditions and standards - are depicted as native to other worlds and universes.

It has been generally the custom of writers on natural history to take the habits and instincts of animals as the fixed point, and to consider their structure and organization as specially adapted to be in accordance with them.