Fiction and nonfiction are not so easily divided. Fiction may not be real, but it's true; it goes beyond the garland of facts to get to emotional and psychological truths.

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.

There was a brief silence. I think I heard snow falling.

In all climates under all skies man's happiness is always somewhere else.

What kind of love would drive a man for miles through solid rock?

There'll always be serendipity involved in discovery.

I've always been extremely physical.

My interest is in how meaning is communicated via language, and I believe the shape, positioning, even the color of the language has an effect on meaning.

Bettie Page was the first person to do bondage as fashion, because for her it really was all about dressing up.

death was the price of life.

I will sometimes post tweets that are about a specific person or people, in which case I will imagine the people I am tweeting about to be my audience.

For every $1 advertisers spend advertising something healthful like apples, they spend $500 advertising junk food.