“If you took the city of Tokyo and turned it upside down and shook it you would be amazed at the animals that fall out: badgers, wolves, boa constrictors, crocodiles, ostriches, baboons, capybaras, wild boars, leopards, manatees, ruminants, in untold numbers.”

He’s a shy man. Life has taught him not to show off what is most precious to him.

To lose a brother is to lose someone with whom you can share the experience of growing old, who is supposed to bring you a sister-in-law and nieces and nephews, creatures who people the tree of your life and give it new branches.

Religion is just an alternate way of reading reality – you read material reality, and then you add on an extra layer of religiosity that deepens that understanding of reality. Some countries have lost that capacity, or dismissed it or marginalized it.

The worst pair of opposites is boredom and terror. Sometimes your life is a pendulum swing from one to the other.

I have read that there are two fears that cannot be trained out of us: the startle reaction upon hearing an unexpected noise, and vertigo.

We commonly say in the trade that the most dangerous animal in a zoo is Man.

When you’ve suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling.

I was giving up. I would have given up – if a voice hadn’t made itself heard in my heart. The voice said “I will not die. I refuse it. I will make it through this nightmare.

My greatest wish – other than salvation – was to have a book.

Life will defend itself no matter how small it is.

Life on a lifeboat isn’t much of a life. It is like an end game in chess, a game with few pieces. The elements couldn’t be more simple, nor the stakes higher.

Artists invent things as a way of telling the truth.

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?

If you don’t let technology help you, if you resist good ideas, you condemn yourself to dinosaurhood.

Was it the forgetfulness of old age or personal incapacity that made the man able to say please but not thank you?

…animals don’t escape from somewhere but from something

Nature is a petrified magic city.

And if the City falls and one survives he shall carry the City within on the roads of exile he shall be the City

I work while I’m on the move, so I’m able to book sessions in different cities.

Golden bracelets, diamonds and rare blue pearls. New gadgets and sparkling shoes, Things I do not own left languishing in the wooden drawer I do not have. I am too busy walking in parks admiring the city from afar and mesmerising dancing trees.

Let me take you to a city we’ve never before been. Let us lose ourselves in old streets until we’ve made ourselves a new home.

If you ask, who has the chance to move into the city and get a good job out in the developing world? It’s a man. Who’s left to care for the kids back at home? The woman is.

Inspire other communities and cities to reinvent themselves.

It was a good place for getting lost in, a city no one ever knew, a city explored from the neutral heart outward, until after many years, it defined itself into a jumble of clearings separated by stretches of the unknown, through which the narrowest of paths had been cut.