Books are something social - a writer speaking to a reader - so I think making the reading of a book the center of a social event, the meeting of a book club, is a brilliant idea.

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.

Thanks be to God, who has been my very helper from the day I was born to this present moment.

I'm in love with writing, but sometimes I swear it hates me.

I'm so excited to act; that has been a huge passion for me.

I have no projects on the horizon. I don't feel frustrated. It's a great life lesson for me.

There are going to be people doing the talking and people who get talked about, choose, which one do you want to be?

I disagree with the widely held view that it is metaphysical necessity, not nomological, that matters in the mind/body problem.

Coincidence is just the conformist term for fate.

Crises are part of life. Everybody has to face them, and it doesn't make any difference what the crisis is.

I see myself as the oldest griot tradition of speaking to truth out here. There's a dark side that people don't even know is there.

Life is deceitful because all warfare is based on deception.