Despair was a heavy blackness that let no light in or out. It was a hell beyond expression. I thank God it always passed.

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.

Fear leads to worry. Worry leads to depression. But faith overcomes fear and worry.

The public don't know what they want; it's my job to tell them.

I just hold it down for my side, I just hold it down for my set. I just give everybody a piece of this and make do with what's left.

Yeah, Under The Table And Dreaming shaped the way that I think about writing songs.

If you still have to ask, shame on you

Never cut a tree down in the wintertime. Never make a negative decision in the low time.

Happiness is present time, it has nothing to do with the future.

The European Union's enlargement is part of the natural process of integration and globalisation that is underway in the world today.

Feeling in the young precedes philosophy, and often acts with a more certain aim.

The rich have markets, the poor have bureaucrats.