“Darwinism is dynamic. It is about change, not stasis; about process, not pattern; about tales, not tableaux; about becoming, not being.”

“No fossil is buried with its birth certificate. That, and the scarcity of fossils, means that it is effectively impossible to link fossils into chains of cause and effect in any valid way... To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story—amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific.”

“Natural selection is a blind and undirected consequence of the interaction between variation and the environment. Natural selection exists only in the continuous present of the natural world: it has no memory of its previous actions, no plans for the future, or underlying purpose.”

“There's something appealing about a quiet story that has depth, that has the ability to reach out and connect people for a long time to come.”

“The nice thing about being a celebrity is that if you bore people they think it's their fault.”

“I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.”

“One thing is certain, that when you die and are resurrected you belong to the earth and whatever is of the earth is yours inalienably. You become an anomaly of nature, a being without shadow; you will never die again but only pass away like the phenomena about you.”