That's what fiction is about, isn't it, the selective transforming of reality? The twisting of it to bring out its essence?

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.

If you do not get to her time...............He will cut out her heart & feed it to the fishes...." Alice

Thinking, understanding, reasoning, willing, call not these Soul They are its actions, but they are not its essence.

Information doesn't mean a thing to people without inspiration.

In Chicago, we love our crooks!

Any company designed for success in the 20th century is doomed to failure in the 21st.

I met a man once who told me that far from believing in the square root of minus one, he didn't believe in minus one. This is at any rate a consistent attitude.

If only you could hear the sound of snow

You build a successful life a day at a time.

I was with the U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali on the day that Srebrenica fell, which happened to be a huge historical turning point in the Bosnian war.

Hip-hop...has been the proverbial key that's opened the door for me to roam this breathtaking planet.