I'm fascinated by the mysterious element that runs through our lives. Everyone is looking out of the world through their emotion and history. Nobody has an absolute reality.

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.

Everybody is fighting a hard battle that you know nothing about, never give up with yours.

She smirks."Are you attempting to stop me, little one?""Excuse me? Did you just call me 'little one'? What are you? Like, four feet tall?" I ask.

I don't believe that classical architecture is enough to engage people anymore. They say: 'So what else is new?'

The time is approaching when we shall consider it abhorrent to our civilization to allow a human being to die in prolonged agony which we should mercifully end in any other creature.

You have to step over the boundaries sometimes just to find out where theyare.

As such, the least practicable measure of government must be the best. Anything beyond the minimum must be oppression.

I never went to college, so I went to the library.

I hated teaching composition. I was playing music I didn't particularly want to play, being on committees I didn't want to be on.

I never close my mind to anything and eventually want to branch out. But for now, tennis is still number one for me.

I grew up in a very small, rural country town, and we didn't really have 'the arts.'