I don't ask for the meaning of the song of a bird or the rising of the sun on a misty morning. There they are, and they are beautiful.
Man can now fly in the air like a bird, swim under the ocean like a fish, he can burrow into the ground like a mole. Now if only he could walk the earth like a man, this would be paradise.
I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will.
So what did influence 'Bird Box?' Well, I've had a crush on Medusa since about 1985. Maybe the book is an ode to her.
I have been blessed with friends who do things rather than buy things: friends who will change books at the library, take a bag of your old clothes to a thrift store, bring you cuttings and plant them in a window box, fill the bird feeder in your garden when you can't get out.
As a novelist, you have to pick your battles. You are tired. You have begun to experience the first ominous tinglings of carpal tunnel syndrome. You wake up in the middle of the night with both hands lying across your chest like a couple of plucked bird carcasses, dead of all sensation.
In New York, I run into Packers fans who have never lived in Wisconsin, Canadiens fans who have never lived in La Belle Province, Celtics fans who admire Russell and Bird and Pierce but have no trace of a Boston accent.
Becoming a bird ecologist was just luck! I had the chance to be a field assistant for a scientist working in the Galapagos Islands, and while I was there, I saw a particular problem in behavioral biology that I wanted to solve and, in the process, made myself into a bird ecologist.
Most chartreuse recipes call for one bird, a fat one, like a pigeon or a partridge, secreted inside the casing, a vegetable mold, which is then turned out onto a plate.
When I was eight or nine, I came to London for the day from Swindon and went to The National Gallery. I remember standing in Trafalgar Square with my best friend Tim, who was covered in pigeons because I put bird seed on his head.
I have snakes, three sharks, moray eels, piranhas, five scorpions and a bird spider. All of them are predators. They are dangerous but it's cool to have strong and powerful pets.
Everything that's realistic has some sort of ugliness in it. Even a flower is ugly when it wilts, a bird when it seeks its prey, the ocean when it becomes violent.
I never actually sought out an agent or a publishing house. A friend of mine named David Simmer got wind of what I was doing, and he sent one of my books to a literary lawyer in Los Angeles. He loved it, and he sent it to other people, including an agent, and he picked me up, and that's how 'Bird Box' got to where it is now.
I wrote the script to 'Lady Bird,' and it really came out of a desire to make a project about home - like, what the meaning of home is, and place. I knew Sacramento very well, obviously, growing up there, and I felt like the right way to tell a story of a place was through a person who's about to leave it.
It's like going to the zoo when you come to my house. I have snakes, three sharks, moray eels, piranhas, five scorpions and a bird spider.
One of the great things about stargazing is that it's immediately at hand for so many people. You know, you could get into scuba diving or bird watching, but the stars are always up there.
The guy was infected with bird flu because he took a sick chicken, slaughtered it and and then ate it.
I think that Vegas is one of the wildest places I've ever been to. You can look to your left and there's a drag queen getting married by Elvis, to the right there is some old bird sticking quarters into a slot machine for hours.
I was a smoker for years. Occasionally I slip and have a cigarette. Remarkably, my voice has held up. I'm grateful, obviously. But I don't gargle with honey and ground-up bird eggs. I have no secrets.
Time sometimes flies like a bird, sometimes crawls like a snail; but a man is happiest when he does not even notice whether it passes swiftly or slowly.
