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Richard Preston Biography

Richard Preston (born August 5, 1954) is a New Yorker writer and bestselling author who has written books about infectious disease, bioterrorism, redwoods and other subjects, as well as fiction. Whether journalistic or fictional, his writings are based on extensive background research and interviews.

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Richard Preston Quotes

The best way to know what's in the soup, is to boil yourself in it.

Best Way, Boil, Know, Soup, Way

In biology, nothing is clear, everything is too complicated, everything is a mess, and just when you think you understand something, you peel off a layer and find deeper complications beneath. Nature is anything but simple.

Deeper, Layer, Life, Simple, Thinking, Understand

Occasionally they came to villages, and at each village they encountered a roadblock of fallen trees. Having had centuries of experience with the smallpox virus, the village elders had instituted their own methods for controlling the virus, according to their received wisdom, which was to cut their villages off from the world, to protect their people from a raging plague. It was reverse quarantine, an ancient practice in Africa, where a village bars itself from strangers during a time of disease, and drives away outsiders who appear. (94)

Cutting, Disease, Methods, People, Practice, Virus

You can’t fight off Ebola the way you fight off a cold. Ebola does in ten days what it takes AIDS ten years to accomplish.

Days, Ebola, Fight, Fighting, Years

It showed a kind of obscenity you see only in nature, an obscenity so extreme that it dissolves imperceptibly into beauty.

Extremes, Kind, Obscenity, Showed

To mess around with Ebola is an easy way to die. Better to work with something safer, such as anthrax.

Anthrax, Easy, Ebola, Mess, Way

He liked the loneliness of inner space, the sense of being forgotten by the world.

Forgotten, Liked, Loneliness, Space, World

If equations are trains threading the landscape of numbers, then no train stops at pi.

Landscape, Math, Numbers, Stops, Train, Trains

Humans in space suits make monkeys nervous.

Monkeys, Nervous, Space, Suits

When people asked him why he didn't work with those viruses, he replied, I don't particularly feel like dying.

Asked, Dying, Particularly, People, Viruses

Once the cells in a biological machine stop working, it can never be started again. It goes into a cascade of decay, falling toward disorder and randomness. Except in the case of viruses. They can turn off and go dead. Then, if they come in contact with a living system, they switch on and multiply. (194)

Cascade, Cells, Fall, Viruses, Working

What can the redwoods tell us about ourselves? Well, I think they can tell us something about human time. The flickering, transitory quality of human time and the brevity of human life - the necessity to love.

Human, Inspiration, Love, Motivation, Necessity, Thinking

The Ludolphian number is fixed in eternity— not a digit out of place, all characters in their proper order, an endless sentence written to the end of the world by the division of the circle’s diameter into its circumference.

Character, Circles, Digit, Ludolphian, Order, Place

The earth is attempting to rid itself of an infection by human parasite.

Attempting, Earth, Human, Infection, Parasites

Time has a different quality in a forest, a different kind of flow. Time moves in circles, and events are linked, even if it's not obvious that they are linked. Events in a forest occur with precision in the flow of tree time, like the motions of an endless dance. (p. 12)

Circles, Endless, Events, Moves, Moving, Tree

During climbs into taller trees, I was occasionally able to look down on the backs of birds, which shine with reflected sunlight as they move through the green depths of the canopy, like schools of fish.

Backs, Green, Moving, Reflected, School, Shining