Time & Perspective Quote by Jared Diamond

Restlessness is doing a lot of work here. Diamond frames curiosity not as a charming personality trait but as a lifelong operating system: multiple fascinations running in parallel, all demanding some internal accounting. The line "at the same time" is the tell. He is describing a mind that resists single-lane expertise, which is exactly the posture that later powers his big, cross-disciplinary arguments about why societies diverge. He’s not selling genius; he’s selling method.

"I always tried to explain them to myself" quietly shifts the audience from the world to the self. The subtext is that understanding has to survive private scrutiny before it deserves public confidence. That’s a scientist’s habit dressed in memoir language: hypotheses formed in the head, stress-tested against doubt, then offered up as narrative. It also hints at a certain impatience with received wisdom. If you need to explain something to yourself, you’re admitting that other people’s explanations aren’t automatically satisfactory.

"I ask a lot of questions" sounds simple, but it’s a rhetorical move that makes ambition seem modest. Diamond’s career has drawn both admiration and critique for sweeping synthesis. This quote preemptively justifies that scale: if the questions are broad enough, the answers have to range across biology, geography, history, and culture. Contextually, it’s a self-portrait of the generalist at a time when expertise is often policed by narrow credentials. Diamond’s implicit argument is that the real boundary isn’t disciplines; it’s whether you can keep interrogating your own story hard enough to make it hold.