Being blessed with good health gives you the strength and loving what you do and - is a privilege that keeps you going. So I'm just happy as a lark.

I love straight-face comedy or relatively subtle comedy. And then I turn around and I find myself doing very broad comedy but it's all fun and you have to keep your sense of humor and not take yourself seriously.

I've worked with the Los Angeles Zoo for 45 years, and we have this magnificent photographer, Tad Motoyama. He takes these wonderful, wonderful animal pictures. All through the years he's given me copies of these pictures. Well, I have all these gorgeous ones, so I said, 'Tad, I want to do a book with your picture on one side.'

I'm in the middle of my sixth book, which is about animals at the Los Angeles Zoo.

A lot of people think this is a goodie two-shoes talking. But we do have a tendency to complain rather than celebrating who we are. I learned at my mother's knee it's better to appreciate what's happening... I think we kind of talk ourselves into the negative sometimes.

I love bawdy humor, but not dirty humor.

Animals don't lie. Animals don't criticize. If animals have moody days, they handle them better than humans do.