If having a soul means being able to feel love and loyalty and gratitude then animals are better off than a lot of humans.

Of all the creative work produced by humans anywhere a tiny fraction has continuing commercial value. For that tiny fraction the copyright is a crucially important legal device.

Humans may or may not have cosmic significance and if they do it will be by hitching a ride on the objective centrality of knowledge in the cosmic scheme of things.

It wasn't a problem for me drawing humans although I had originally come to the studio with the idea that what I had to offer them was my knowledge in the drawing of animals.

For 13 to be unlucky would require there to be some kind of cosmic intelligence that counts things that humans count and that also makes certain things happen on certain dates or in certain places according to whether the number 13 'is involved' or not (whatever 'is involved' might mean).

I think that animals aren't less intelligent than humans they're just of a different intelligence. We have five million smell-sensitive cells in our nose they have two hundred and fifty million - they can smell emotion. They can smell different types of emotion they just have another type of intelligence.

I'm an optimist in the sense that I believe humans are noble and honorable and some of them are really smart. I have a very optimistic view of individuals.

Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity it is the power to that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

Introspection and preserved writings give us far more insight into the ways of past humans than we have into the ways of past dinosaurs. For that reason I'm optimistic that we can eventually arrive at convincing explanations for these broadest patterns of human history.

Truth is I'll never know all there is to know about you just as you will never know all there is to know about me. Humans are by nature too complicated to be understood fully. So we can choose either to approach our fellow human beings with suspicion or to approach them with an open mind a dash of optimism and a great deal of candour.