My greatest wish — other than salvation — was to have a book. A long book with a never-ending story. One I could read again and again, with new eyes and a fresh understanding each time.

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.

Without love, life has no meaning.

The sudden appearance of pain and pressure are not indicative of an injury, but of the presence of suppressed emotions.

Back in the day, when the emperor or the king or whatever waged war, they went to war, too. But that's been lost in time.

If the script is not so good and it is a great director you're more likely to do it. But generally speaking, my passion for a project starts or stops with the quality of the script.

Don't mistake pleasure for happiness. They are a different breed of dogs.

Wealth is well known to be a great comforter.

He who reflects on another man's want of breeding, shows he wants it as much himself

This is possibly the most shameful situation I've ever gotten myself in in my life, and I've done some pretty dumb things in my life. So to actually make a new No. 1 is spectacularly stupid.

Alone, he must bear the weight of a sin he dare not confess to the one person he loves…and has lost.

Owning is owing, having is hoarding.