Quotes from Lydia Millet

Economic and health statistics, as well as police-violence statistics, shed light on the pressures on American Indian communities and individuals: Indian youths have the highest suicide rate of any United States ethnic group.

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 wanted to write about this tropical honeymoon in part because I had the most drastically terrible honeymoon.

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

Both climate change and extinction are results of our tyranny over the nonhuman world and our domination of, and exploitation of, whole categories of each other - and those, in turn, are clearly linked to agriculture, the cattle-industrial complex, capitalism.

'Dept. of Speculation' contains numerous enviable lines.

Marriage is like the romantic ideal, and yet the trappings around it and the culture about it are really the opposite of that.

I don't like names that are clever or made-up sounding.

In the 1970s, Safari Club International asked the federal government to approve its import of 1,125 not-yet-killed trophies of 40 endangered species, including gorillas, orangutans and tigers, according to the Humane Society of the United States.

Snark describes a cynical position, and I'm not interested in that.

People who are obsessed amuse me.

I've always been interested in obsessive, insane people.

The comic novels I did when I was in my 20s had a harder edge - less sympathy for people. Or a sympathy that was harder to detect: Characters' foibles and obsessive bents were unrelenting, like caricatures.

If I can't find a way to love it, I let it go. Kind of the opposite of the popular homily.

Children depend mightily on animals for comfort, inspiration, imagination, and art. And parents have long recognized this.

Domestic realism has dominated the American marketplace for decades now. It leeches into literary fiction, and I don't think it's that rich a vein.

African elephants have long been thought of as a single species, but a critical mass of genetic studies now proves there are two.

My motto is, if you love something, don't set it free. No matter how hard it struggles. That would be stupid.

One man's holy is another woman's sublime.

It seems to me that the time for subtlety in our American life has passed.

We were a Seuss family. As a child, I read almost all of his books, but the one I loved best was 'The Lorax.'

The question of one versus two species of African elephants isn't about settling an arcane DNA argument; it's about life or death for these majestic, extraordinary creatures.

It is not learning we need at all. Individuals need learning but the culture needs something else, the pulse of light on the sea, the warm urge of huddling together to keep out the cold. We need empathy, we need the eyes that still can weep.

The rooms of his apartment were full with the dog home again, convalescing. He was satisfied to know, even when she was out of sight, that somewhere in the apartment she was sleeping or eating or sitting watchfully. It was family, he guessed, more or less. Did most people want a house of living things at night, to know that in the dark around them other warm bodies slept? Such a house could even be the whole world.