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My only job is to write in such a way that the reader gets a new handle on humanity.

I consider what I write to be literature. I choose the words carefully.

I write what's given me to write.

I know you're supposed to hide your influences, but I suppose I see writing as riffing, really, about whatever you have been reading or thinking about that day or that week.

I work at the sentences. Many of the things people find distinctive about my writing, I think of as natural.

My job was to get a fair and open hearing to all ideas.

I wrote 'Airborn' after completing three books about bats. I loved my bats, but what a treat it was to write about humans again. They could eat food other than midges and mosquitoes, they wore clothing, they slept in beds - all this struck me as wonderfully novel.

I'd like, each time out as a writer, to reinvent who I am and what I'm doing. That's one of the great pleasures and rewards of the occupation.

My assignment is what every writer's assignment is: tell the truth of his own time.