As for hearing, the sloth is not so much deaf as uninterested in sound.

A work of art works because it is true, not because it is real.

It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life.

The animals might embody certain traits. We think of tigers as being ferocious, etc. But to my mind, it was the other way around: the humans embodied certain animal traits.

Fiction and nonfiction are not so easily divided. Fiction may not be real, but it's true; it goes beyond the garland of facts to get to emotional and psychological truths. As for nonfiction, for history, it may be real, but its truth is slippery, hard to access, with no fixed meaning bolted to it. If history doesn't become story, it dies to everyone except the historian.

My gratitude to him is as boundless as the Pacific ocean.

I think art comes from some sense of discomfort with the world, some sense of not quite fitting with it.