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

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.

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.

The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.

Do young people have the moral stamina to carry through in case of economic depression? . . . The real tests of the [younger] generations have not yet come, but they are on their way!

Man is not the creature of circumstances circumstances are the creature of man. We are free agents and man is more powerful than matter.

It serves notice that President Bush is serious about promoting freedom, because free societies are a lot more peaceable than dictatorships and monarchies.

The important thing is to never stop questioning. Never lose a holy curiosity.

It's very weird waking around a corner and being nose to nose with myself on the side of a bus. And Times Square - that's the craziest one.

The bigger the cushion, the better the pushin'.

The intellectually sophisticated person is indifferent to all genuine individuality, because relationships and reactions result from it which cannot be exhausted with logical operations.

Whether the gods are inside or outside makes very little difference to whether there are gods.

Music is not disposable, people. We can twist it, sample it, mash it and experience it in endless ways. Open up.

...Her entire life has been devoted to healing the deepest, most invasive unseeable scar that one can ever have.