I never seem to leave L.A., though I left L.A.

Some suggestions for you :

When it comes to American Indians, mainstream America suffers from willful blindness.

It's a friendly act to write a lighthearted book.

Wyoming, home to Yellowstone National Park and the Grand Tetons, is also the country's largest coal producer and one of its largest gas drillers. Two-thirds of the state's gas-drilling rigs are on public lands in the increasingly industrialized Greater Green River Basin.

When I was 16, I went to Berlin - West Berlin, since at that time a wall still divided the city - to live for three months with a family on an exchange program.

You're lucky if people like your book, and the more people that like it, the luckier I feel.

The Free Body Culture gave me a gift I might never have received had I refused to play along. It left me with an acute sense of the absurd - one I still cherish - to be there among my fellow apes, awkward and less than half-willing, aiming and missing, leaping, landing and wincing.

Without elephants, Africa's landscape would be unrecognizable, yet these animals have fallen by the hundreds of thousands as a result of two enormous waves of poaching in this century - one in the 1970s and 1980s, the other, beginning around 2009, now underway.

There has to be space for play in literature. We all need some breathing room.

You need not fear my extinction. Fear my proliferation! I've already reproduced!

If you're going to do a thing, do it fully so that no writing you give the world misrepresents you - so that nothing you put out there is like a sad regift you couldn't throw away and had to find a place for.

At 16, I was more resilient and easygoing than I am now.

If you're doing creative work, that work should never feel trivial - even if what you're doing is for hire or lightly intended. Even the mundane doesn't have to be trivial.

I'm not calculating enough in the way I approach writing.

I worry about the very pernicious way we elevate and separate ourselves from other beasts, the way we rationalize our comfort and ease, our worship of the self, as healthy. It's enticing, but with a terrible taint of evil.