I am a person who believes in form, in the harmony of order. Where we can, we must give things a meaningful shape.

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.

Maybe that's why life is so precious. No rewind or fast forward...just patience and faith.

You can not hide on an island and expect that water will not find you.

Literacy: Blessing? Or curse?

I love having a president who I think is smarter than I am.

I'd like to think of my self as not melancholic at all, I think I'm a pretty cheerful person, really.

When I was twelve, the biggest name in Rock and Roll was Elvis Presley. I bought an EP, "King Creole". I hid it in the basement, but my mother found it.

15 of the 19 [September 11th] hijackers were from Saudi Arabia.

A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands, knowing it is something that feeds him more than water.

In the major state capitalists economies, Europe and the US, it's low growth and stagnation and a very sharp income differentiation a shift - a striking shift - from production to financialization.

I guess people think the taller you are the more dominant you have to be.