Ghetto-dwellers are the great fantasists. There was an extraordinary vibrancy there, an imaginative life. When you are that poor, all you've got left is your belief in the imagination.

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.

I love puns. I've been known to turn the car around just to take advantage of a good pun situation. It really is the highest form of humor.

It's no fun getting older. I might be wearing beautiful diamond earrings but they can't take away the pain of losing my hearing.

To be fearless no matter what happens-that is the root of true happiness. To move forward resolutely regardless of what lies in store-that is the spirit, the resolve, that leads to human victory.

I want to play until the end.

No, my heart will not yet despair. Gandalf fell and has returned and is with us. We may stand, if only on one leg, or at least be left still upon our knees.

Once you decide that mediocrity is unthinkable, your only choices are excellence and quitting.

It was always hard to find stories that I felt were, in and of themselves, fresh enough and intriguing enough .

In order to possess what you do not possess, you must go by the way of dispossession.

I prefer hallucinations cause they tend to make more sense than experience.

We are never more in danger than when we think ourselves most secure, nor in reality more secure than when we seem to be most in danger.