There is nothing more satisfying than having a sentence fall into place in a way you feel is right, and then adding another one and then another one. It's extraordinarily satisfying.

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.

Tears are not a sign of weakness. They are a sign of compassion.

He thought about how the camera makes one fall in love with an image of oneself, and perpetuates a false reality.

A good parent is not someone that knows how to be a good parent, but knows how to learn how to be a good parent.

Sometimes I have to pretend I feel brave before I actually do. Sometimes I never make it past the pretending part. But those days are getting fewer and further between.

If we mean to have heroes, statesmen and philosophers, we should have learned women.

As weird and awful and terrible as it may seem to be yourself sometimes, it will always reward you.

In this [fashion] business you're living in the future a lot of the time.

I wouldn't be where I am now if I didn't fail ... a lot. The good, the bad, it's all part of the success equation.

At my age you don't go into fatherhood lightly.

I don't leave my house - I don't care if it's raining or scorching hot out - without a face cream with a minimum of SPF 15, if not more.