I remember when I first encountered anthropocentrism. I was in primary school and, in preparation for our confirmation, the class was learning about the afterlife.

As a child, I was consumed with a near-obsessive curiosity about what the world felt like for other creatures.

When you have a child, you think about your personal history and what you offer them as a larger narrative, and I realised I knew nothing about my father's circumstances other than what he'd told me.

'Moby-Dick' really threw me. I read it when I was 14 and my best friends were books. It changed the way I looked at the world.

I'm an insomniac, so my perfect reader is probably another insomniac.

The only pleasure in redecorating or moving house comes from stumbling across books that I'd almost forgotten I owned.

If I tell you a story, you can choose to believe me, or you can question it.

It takes a true encounter to realise that real animals, wild animals, have all but passed from our lives.

The Botanischer Garten in Berlin has one of Europe's finer winter trails, leading in careful order from glasshouses devoted to African-American and Australian desert species, through a fine collection of tropical plants, and on to the orchid house.

I'm interested in the way language is used to navigate the world around us.

'The Asylum Dance' was written after I'd moved back to Scotland and was a response to moving to my old home area of Fife.

The older I get, the happier my childhood becomes.

I always wanted to be a painter. I loved painting. I went on three different art courses but had no talent whatsoever.

I moved south when I was 11 years old, moved to England. I've lived in all kinds of places, all parts of England.

Sadly, bird illustration has always been an under-appreciated art.

You can't sit down and decide what you want to write about.

People will occasionally ask me if I understand what it's like to be lonely. And the truth is I don't, because for me, solitariness is a blessing, a gift. Me, I get on fine with myself.

Net return is simply the gross return of your investment portfolio less the costs you incur. Keep your investment expenses low, for the tyranny of compounding costs can devastate the miracle of compounding returns.

Well, bitcoin is a currency. Bitcoin has no underlying rate of return. You know, bonds have an interest coupon. Stocks have earnings and dividends. Gold has nothing, and bitcoin has nothing. There is nothing to support the bitcoin except the hope that you will sell it to somebody for more than you paid for it.

My grandfather was a wealthy and respected merchant in Montclair, New Jersey, where I was born. But his estate was wiped out in the Great Depression, and as a result, I had what I consider the ideal upbringing: We were a proud family, good citizens, and we didn't have a sou.

The market is often stupid, but you can't focus on that. Focus on the underlying value of dividends and earnings.

It occurs to me that, after the huge output of writing I've produced over the years, there is a close link between my twin careers as investment executive and financial writer: The power of the word and the power of the book have played a major role in turning my vision... into reality.

Well, I like regulation as little as anybody else. It can be intrusive. It can be detailed. It can be bureaucratic. It can be unevenly administered. It can be unfair. But most regulations that we have for mutual funds and for banks are regulations that we earned. We did something wrong and we're paying a price for it.

What indexing does is neutralize a large part of the stock market. There's no trading in those stocks, or almost none.

My father's money vanished in the Great Depression, and he had trouble keeping a job.

I love the English language. Words have power.

The culture of the mutual fund industry, when I came into it in 1951, was pretty much a culture of fiduciary duty and investment, with funds run by investment professionals. The firm I worked with, Wellington Management Co., they had one fund. That was very typical in the industry... investment professionals focused on long-term investing.

Time is your friend; impulse is your enemy.

I do think that impact investing is not that effective. Shares go from investor A to investor B, and the company doesn't even know it. It's inevitably an ineffective way to communicate to the company your feelings.

The best rule for philanthropy is to give until it hurts, as much as you can, because none of us can get through life all by ourselves.

The Vanguard Experiment was designed to prove that mutual funds could operate independently, and do so in a manner that would directly benefit their shareholders.

As I have said before, the daily machinations of the stock market are like a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Don't look for the needle in the haystack. Just buy the haystack.

Enjoy the magic of compounding returns. Even modest investments made in one's early 20s are likely to grow to staggering amounts over the course of an investment lifetime.

Nothing is simpler than owning the stock market and holding it forever, and that's essentially the idea behind the index fund.

While we would typically encourage young people to start saving for the future as early as possible, it's unlikely that a budding entrepreneur will be able to do so. The entrepreneur will need every bit of capital available for the business, which will likely crowd out personal savings.

When our financial system - essentially our money managers, marketers of investment products and stockbrokers - put up zero percent of the capital and assume zero percent of the risk yet receive fully 80% of the return, something has gone terribly wrong in our financial system.

Our financial system is driven by a giant marketing machine in which the interests of sellers directly conflict with the interests of buyers.

If the fluctuations in your investment portfolio are reduced, the impact of emotions and behavior on your account is also reduced.

Vanguard never would have happened if I hadn't been fired as CEO of Wellington Management Company, the firm that did the investing for the Wellington fund and eight sister funds.

If you were to just design the perfect retirement plan, you would own the stock market or you would own the bond market. You would get all the costs or all that you possibly could out of the system. So on an annual basis, if the market went up 8 percent, you would get 7.8 or 7.9 percent.

I liked the so-called Volcker Rule. I would have separated investment banking and commercial, deposit banking, as we did under the Glass-Steagal Act. I would have brought back Glass-Steagal.

Mutual funds with superior performance records often falter.

Have rational expectations for future returns and avoid changing those expectations in response to the ephemeral noise coming from Wall Street.

If we wanted something, we had to earn it.

I would advise someone who has just retired to be something in the broad range of 50/50 stocks and bonds.

We do some things for family reasons. If it's not consistent, well, life isn't always consistent.

It is the power of words and books - explaining and dramatizing great ideas and articulating high ideals - that is the greatest weapon in the missionary's arsenal.

I've been studying mutual funds since 1949, when I began researching my senior thesis at Princeton University.

While the interests of the business are served by the aphorism 'Don't just stand there. Do something!' the interests of investors are served by an approach that is its diametrical opposite: 'Don't do something. Just stand there!'