A people are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves. Sick storytellers can make nations sick.

The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering.

The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing.

We have not yet arrived, but every point at which we stop requires a re-definition of our destination.

When you can imagine you begin to create and when you begin to create you realize that you can create a world that you prefer to live in, rather than a world that you're suffering in.

We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings.

Beware of the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.

There ought to be three traditions in the art of humanity: the realistic, the visionary and the wild.

Stories are the secret reservoir of values: change the stories individuals and nations live by and tell themselves, and you change the individuals and nations.

The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.

What you see is what you make. What you see in a people is what you eventually create in them.

Self-trust is the first secret of success.

A good library is a place, a palace where the lofty spirits of all nations and generations meet.

You have to deal with the fact that your life is your life.

People call you this or that. But I can't respond because then it seems like I'm defensive, you know, what does it matter, really?

I think great acting is about inhabiting a skin and transforming yourself.

You can make people do anything if they're afraid.

Loyalty is a cohesive force that forges individuals into a team.

One does not devote one's life in art to shock an audience.

You know my parents, man, they're just the most loving, encouraging... They're like those people who define themselves through their role as parents before people in their own rights.

I can't see myself just endlessly singing the same songs over and over again.