My next book - each one while I'm working on it - dances in my mind and thrills me at every turn. If it didn't, why would I write it?

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 never did master a leer."- Katharine Murray, Death on the Family Tree

It would be ridiculous to say I don't want to sell records, but I trust my taste.

God in heaven has dominion Over so many events. He can frustrate what seems inevitable, And bring to pass the thing that you least expect.

Slavery is dead, but the spirit which animated it still lives.

Happily, I come out of a Calvinist tradition in which the Hebrew Bible carries as much authority as the New Testament. No different weight is given to one or the other.

If our souls be immortal, this makes amends for the frailties of life and the sufferings of this state.

John [Mulaney] likes to say I'm like a district attorney with absolutely no jurisdiction whatsoever.

Country music is still your grandpa's music, but it's also your daughter's music. It's getting bigger and better all the time and I'm glad to be a part of it.

My favorite sports movies, I like 'Remember the Titans' and 'Hoosiers' Jimmy Chitwood, from the corner.

We must safely secure our border by investing in more law enforcement and technology, and receiving cooperation from the Mexican government.