I love being a lawyer more than I like writing.
I've always felt you don't have to be completely detached, emotionally uninvolved to make precise observations. There's nothing wrong with feeling great empathy for your subjects.
I started as - well, I wanted to be Poet Laureate. And I wanted to be a naturalist. That's how I began. I didn't have any desire to go and be a scientist. Louis Leakey channeled me there. I'm delighted he did. I love science. I love analyzing and making sense of all these observations. So, it was the perfect rounding off of who I was into who I am.
It's the bond between mother and child, which is really for us and for chimps and other primates, the root of all the expressions of social behavior.
It was both fascinating and appalling to learn that chimpanzees were capable of hostile and territorial behavior that was not unlike certain forms of primitive human warfare.
There isn't a sharp line dividing humans from the rest of the animal kingdom. All the time, we find animals doing things that, in our arrogance, we thought were just human.
From my perspective, I absolutely believe in a greater spiritual power, far greater than I am, from which I have derived strength in moments of sadness or fear. That's what I believe, and it was very, very strong in the forest.
Love knows how to forgive. Love cannot hurt and cannot be violent.
As I have said so often before, the long memory is the most radical idea in America….
Safety is all well and good: I prefer freedom.
I autograph a lot of body parts of intoxicated people. And lots of shoes. And I signed a diaper once!