Any writer will be happy and good only if they know what they're doing and why they're doing 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.

In Buddhism we also interprete Dharma to mean 'cessation, ' as in the end of dissatisfaction, the end of dukkha. This is the purpose of Buddha's teachings.

The atmosphere is much too near for dreams. It forces us to action. It is close to us. We are in it and of it. It rouses us both to study and to do. We must know its moods and also its motive forces.

Everyone has a desire, if not a need, to use their individual signatures. Whenever people meet to talk about a project, even stuffy old businessmen, they say they want to create something new.

Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.

I think digital. I think digital and I was terrified about it for a long time. But I think digital because it gives so much more freedom to work with the actors.

I ate a bug once. It was flying around me. I was trying to get it away. It went right in my mouth. It was so gross!

I—I didn't think—" "That," said Professor McGonagall, "is obvious.

My sense is that you can never teach anybody anything, or change anybody in ways that they don't already have in mind.

O lovely chance, what can I doTo give my gratefulness to you?You rise between myself and meWith a wise persistency;I would have broken body and soul,But by your grace, still I am whole.

Any time you can squeeze out the opportunity to get better, you should.