Artists invent things as a way of telling the truth.

You must take life the way it comes at you and make the best of it.

My life is like a memento mori painting from European art: there is always a grinning skull at my side to remind me of the folly of human ambition.

Slice a pear and you will find that its flesh is incandescent white. It glows with inner light. Those who carry a knife and a pear are never afraid of the dark.

Zoo is an artificial territory, an approximation. Civilization is our natural territory.

To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.

Life is a peephole, a single tiny entry onto a vastness--how can I not dwell on this brief, cramped view of things? This peephole is all I've got!

We commonly say in the trade that the most dangerous animal in a zoo is Man.

I know zoos are no longer in people's good graces. Religion faces the same problem. Certain illusions about freedom plague them both.

If you stumble at mere believability, what are you living for? Isn't love hard to believe?

No one dies of nausea, but it can seriously sap the will to live.

I decided that we should have a flag, that a flag fit us as a symbol, that we are a people, a tribe if you will. And flags are about proclaiming power, so it's very appropriate.

Cold & cunning come from the north: But cunning sans wisdom is nothing worth.

I'm a little like Marco Polo, going around and mixing cultures.

And silence, like darkness, can be kind; it, too, is a language.

A nutritionist has told me to have very little butter and very little spices, but I can't live like that.

Christianity is fundamentally convalescence.. .God is not only the doctor who prescribes, He is the nurse who lifts up our powerless head and puts the spoon in our mouth...And He is the medicine.

A lot of English traditional music is guesswork anyway, so it's very difficult for people to be vehemently opposed to experimenting with it.

If you get yourself killed, I'll find your grave and spit on it," she threatened.

Customers must be delicately angled for at a safe distance - show yourself too much, and, like trout, they flashed away.

Good citizenship and defending democracy means living up to the ideals and values that make this country great.