Latest David Quammen Quotes from Interviews

• If you are lying in a tent in the Congo jungle, you don't want to be reading about rainforest biology. You want to be in a distant world.

  David Quammen

  Lying, Reading, World

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

• As I started to read nonfiction in the mid '70s, I discovered, holy cow, there was a lot of imaginative nonfiction. Not the kind where people use composite characters and invented quotes. I hate that kind of nonfiction. But imaginative in the sense that good writing and unexpected structure and vivid reporting could be combined with presenting facts.

  David Quammen

  Hate, Writing, Character

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

• I used to read only fiction. Now I don't read much, only occasionally, such as a Cormac McCarthy or a Jim Harrison novel.

  David Quammen

  Fiction, Used, Novel

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

• I wrote four novels, but then I realized that the world didn't need me to be a novelist, but the world could use me as a nonfiction writer.

  David Quammen

  Novelists, Needs, Use

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

• You can hike into the Yellowstone backcountry. You can camp in the Yellowstone backcountry. You can take food into the Yellowstone backcountry, and you're surrounded by grizzly bears. And it's - it's a very, very thrilling, peculiar situation. Every sound that you hear in the night, you wonder is this a grizzly bear coming to tear into my tent?

  David Quammen

  Night, Yellowstone, Tears

  "Is Yellowstone National Park In Danger Of Being 'Loved To Death'?". "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, www.npr.org. June 10, 2016.

• If you're Maasai Mara National Park in Kenya, if you're in Serengeti National Park in Tanzania, you don't get out of your vehicle and go walking around amid the lions and the leopards. You stay in your Land Rover. You stay in your safari van, and you look out the windows or you look out the pop top at these animals. I know by experience how badly that can work out if you violate those guidelines.

  David Quammen

  Animal, Land, Work Out

  "Is Yellowstone National Park In Danger Of Being 'Loved To Death'?". "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, www.npr.org. June 10, 2016.

• The elk are the most abundant large herbivores in the Yellowstone ecosystem. There are thousands and thousands of them. They migrate in and out. And those migration routes need to stay open.

  David Quammen

  Yellowstone, Ecosystems, Needs

  Source: www.npr.org

• But private lands development around the periphery of the parks - Grand Teton and Yellowstone - is a crucial issue because if those private lands are transformed from open pastures, meadow, forest land to suburbs, to little ranchettes, to shopping malls, to roads, to Starbucks - if those places are all settled for the benefit of humans, then the elk are not going to be able to migrate in and out of Yellowstone Park anymore. And if the elk can't migrate into the park, then that creates problems for the wolves, for the grizzlies, for a lot of other creatures.

  David Quammen

  Issues, Yellowstone, Land

  "< Is Yellowstone National Park In Danger Of Being 'Loved To Death'?". "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, www.npr.org. April 18, 2016.

• And so in 1975, the grizzly bear was put on, as I said - on the endangered species list as threatened. And new measures were taken, for instance, bear-proofing garbage, creating new regulations to - essentially to try and keep people and people's food away from the bears, let the bears adjust to eating the abundant wild food that's available in Yellowstone and allow them to be more wild, to be independent of humans as sources of foods for the good of both sides. And that has been quite successful.

  David Quammen

  Taken, Independent, Successful

  "Is Yellowstone National Park In Danger Of Being 'Loved To Death'?". "Fresh Air" with David Bianculli, www.npr.org. June 10, 2016.

• There was a very important superintendent of Yellowstone, a man who was involved in the founding of the National Park Service itself, Horace Albright. And he became superintendent, which is the boss of Yellowstone Park, in 1919 - from 1919 to 1929. Later, he was director of the park service itself. Albright embraced the idea that in order for the national parks - and Yellowstone in particular - to have support from the American people and from politicians, there needed to be wildlife as spectacle.

  David Quammen

  Men, Yellowstone, Order

  Source: www.npr.org