It is a vast country, so that inspires you. It's also the greatest hotel on earth: It welcomes people from everywhere. It's a good country to write from because in many ways Canada is the world.

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.

You show the world as a complete, unbroken chain, an eternal chain, linked together by cause and effect.

Just being yourself is the easiest thing you can do. It doesn't take much effort.

A person's true character lies somewhere until after you might have pressed the wrong button without knowing, then you'll realize that there are dogs in human form.

Why does a steward steal? He steals because he's not sure he'll always remain with his master and wants to make his future secure.

I don't know what these Republican congressmen drink that make them experts on women's reproductive health.

Keep expectation alive. Keep stirring it up. Let much promise more, and great deeds herald greater.

In reality the workings of your governing system are opaque and covert, while hiding in the chattering spotlight of an ostensible transparency, even though the ultimate objective is clear.

Directing is like cooking, it's like cuisine. You cannot make a great dish with bad ingredients. I have great actors, and I'm putting them together. That's all I'm doing.

My mother never asked me to do anything she wouldn't do herself. She always taught by example.

One of the proofs of the immortality of the soul is that myriads have believed it. They also believed the world was flat.