My alarm clock during my childhood was a pride of lions.

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.

Life isn't a life without fitness.

Freedom is to forgive one another for perceived wrongdoing

You'd be surprised what I can do with a butter knife.

For me, the most fun is change or growth. There are definitely elements of both that I like. Launching a business is kind of like a motorboat: You can go very quickly and turn fast.

I read a book a day when I was a kid. My family was not literary; we did not have any books in the house.

The true way is the middle one, halfway between deserving a place and pushing oneself into it.

Literary history is the great morgue where all seek the dead ones whom they love, or to whom they are related.

I get really bored if I don't have more than one thing going on.

I think mascara is a must. If I'm going to wear makeup somewhere, and I'm doing it, it's usually really simple - it's just mascara and maybe a tiny bit of eyeshadow, but that's it.

I have wisdom of a 60-year-old. Also it takes a lot for me to respect a person, so when a person has a body of work behind him, it draws my respect.