This form of interspecies leap is common, not rare; about…

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…

— David Quammen

I am very, very old-fashioned and clumsy. I use those long reporter notebooks. This is what a troglodyte I am. The night before I…

— David Quammen

Most Americans know nothing about the African forest, and it seems to them a very scary, spooky dangerous place. I've spent a lot of…

— David Quammen

“Horses aren’t native to Australia. They are exotic, first brought there by European settlers barely more than two centuries ago. Hendra is probably an…

— David Quammen

Viruses have to live somewhere. They can only replicate in living creatures. So, when the Ebola virus disappears between outbreaks, it has to be…

— David Quammen

“People and gorillas, horses and duikers and pigs, monkeys and chimps and bats and viruses: We’re all in this together.”

— David Quammen

Islands are havens and breeding grounds for the unique and anomalous. They are natural laboratories of extravagant evolutionary experimentation.

— David Quammen

“Each outbreak, by this view, represents a local event primarily explicable by a larger cause—the arrival of the wave. The main proponent of the…

— David Quammen

“The Towner paper contained a very interesting statement, as an aside, concerning the five ebolaviruses: “Viruses of each species have genomes that are at…

— David Quammen

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

The swallow that hibernates underwater is a creature called yearning.

— David Quammen

“It comes and it goes. But epidemiologists have recognized that, with measles virus, as with other pathogens, there’s a critical minimum size of the…

— David Quammen

Whether you like the label 'Anthropocene' or not, whether you find the prospect of what it signifies inevitable or appalling (or both), the time…

— David Quammen

Ebola isn't a respiratory virus. It doesn't spread through the airborne route. So it's not likely to spread like wildfire around the world and…

— David Quammen

I'm a white, middle-class male who had a happy childhood in Ohio. The world does not need me to be a novelist.

— David Quammen