When I was a boy living in Edinburgh in Scotland, especially in December, when the hours of daylight were few, and it was cold, and often wet, I used to dream of escaping to a tropical magic kingdom.

I was born in Cuba, and my parents were tropical agronomists.

I grew up in New Hampshire. My closest neighbor was a mile away. The deer and the raccoons were my friends. So I would spend time walking through the woods, looking for the most beautiful tropical thing that can survive the winter in the woods in New Hampshire.

The thinning of the ozone layer is blamed on logging of tropical forests. The fact that the burning of fossil fuels and release of CFCs (chloro-fluoro-carbons) into the atmosphere occur largely in the rich countries are significantly ignored.

All we need, really, is a change from a near frigid to a tropical attitude of mind.

People see me and they squeal like tropical birds or seals stranded on the beach.

Based on German prototypes, green walls and roofs are a natural idea in Singapore's tropical environment, where mosses, ferns, philodendrons, orchids and other epiphytes literally grow on trees.

No place is perfect, but I admire Oahu for its offering of the tropical and the urban, and then its Asian-inflected culture and cuisines.

The year I was born, 1955, the first big disease-eradication program in the world was declared for malaria. After about a decade of work, they realized that, at least in the tropical areas, they did not have the tools to get it done.

Writing was in my mind from the time I was in high school, but more, the idea that I would be a doctor. I really wanted to be a medical doctor, and I had various schemes: one was to be a psychiatrist, another was tropical medicine.

I'm a tropical weather cruiser. I like surfing, you know. I like being on the beach.

Since I was 19, I've always gone where there was a reason to be. Maybe I'll be lucky and there'll be a reason to go somewhere tropical for a while.

I'm not really a tropical paradise kind of person.

I like words. Words are places, rooms, distant airs, thin and tropical. They make us feel and imagine we are more than our bodies.

On my return to Cornwall I discovered that I was living in a tropical paradise. For now I am content to explore my own home and our nearest neighbour France.

Although native Africans domesticated some plants in the Sahel and in Ethiopia and in tropical West Africa, they acquired valuable domestic animals only later, from the north.

The historical circumstance of interest is that the tropical rain forests have persisted over broad parts of the continents since their origins as stronghold of the flowering plants 150 million years ago.

We lived on the Key West Army Base. Key West for me was a tropical island paradise.

I never saw a painting that would not be improved by the addition of tropical fish.

In order to do 'Amores Perros,' I had to skip some time at drama school, so the director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu came up with a great Latin American solution, which was to say I had a tropical disease and had to stay in Mexico for a while. Everyone believed me.