Why can't reason give greater answers? Why can we throw a question further than we can pull in an answer? Why such a vast net if there's so little fish to catch?

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.

Use your mind to think about things, rather than think of them. You want to be adding value as you think about projects and people, not simply reminding yourself they exist.

This is a place where grandmothers hold babies on their laps under the stars and whisper in their ears that the lights in the sky are holes in the floor of heaven.

It's bad poetry executed by people that can't sing. That's my definition of Rap.

Much of what I make is geometric, and has a kind of almost mathematical logic to the form.

Friendship multiplies blessings and...soothes the soul.

I am a big fan of smelly cheeses but the rest of the family don't seem to be particularly keen on them.

To me, at forty-four years old, my book was a search for truth and identity.

When you get knocked down you get knocked down in Round 1 of life, there's Round 2.

Fiction is just that-fiction. Yes, it is serious business, but it should also be taken for face value. It's entertainment. It's escapism. It's 365 pages of relaxation.

While still in the cage of your being behold the spirit bird before it flies away.