But I want to pray to Allah. I want to be a Christian.

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.

Nowadays it's more beneficial to act like a mutt, than understand reality.

Straight praying is never born of crooked conduct.

If an artist and a scientist have a common point, it is probably in the need for some kind of imaginative thinking to interpret the material they have.

I think it's an honorable thing that Donald Trump is doing.

That is the dream of all novelists-that one of their characters will become 'somebody.'

I'm keeping myself to myself. And I like it that way. I'm not hunting. I'm the opposite of a - what would a male cougar be? Is there such a thing? Whatever it is, I'm not that.

Regrets are born of paths never taken.

I think bullies are very lonely people. I always tell teenagers not to bully others because it's unacceptable. We need to teach students to value themselves and to not put others down.

It is greatest to believe and to hope well of the world, because he who does so, quits the world of experience, and makes the world he lives in.

In Fascism, if you were a Jew, you were simply killed. Nobody had the idea of arresting Jews and torturing them to confess the Jewish plot. Because in Fascism, you are guilty for your whole being.