Quotes from Douglas Preston

How awful a knowledge of the truth can be.

We live in a world gone crazy for resources. Everybody on Google Earth can look at this place now. If you don't move to protect it, it will disappear. Everything in the world is vulnerable.

But we were just picnicking friends

Sleep is an unfortunate biological requirement that both wastes time and leaves one vulnerable.

The mandalas were meant to be objects of contemplation, aids to meditation, their proportions magically balanced to purify and calm the mind. To stare at a mandala was to experience, if only briefly, the nothingness that is at the heart of enlightenment.

Trying to fulfill earthly desires was like carrying water to the sea; a never- ending task, and an ultimately useless one.

The Monster's crimes were so horrific that a mere man could not possibly have committed them. Satan, in the end, had to be invoked.

When I'm writing fiction I'm thinking, God, this is so hard - I have to make all this stuff up! I wish I were writing a nonfiction book where all the facts are laid out and I don't have to be so much at sea.

There is nothing inherently wrong about science.

My hobbies are mountain biking, horseback riding and packing, canoeing and kayaking, hiking, camping, cooking, and skiing.

I need to write in a small room - the smaller the better. I can't write in a big room where someone might sneak up behind my back.

There are so many journalists out there, I hate to say it, who are lazy and don't do their research - and it shows.

My first job was washing dishes in the basement of a nursing home for $2.10 an hour, and I learned as much about the value of hard work there as I ever did later.