“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.”

Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.

Don’t neglect the gold in your own back yard.

What hope is there for individual reality or authenticity when the forces of violence and orthodoxy, the earthly powers of guns and bombs and manipulated public opinion make it impossible for us to be authentic and fulfilled human beings?

I know that human beings are capable of anything.

You are a mischievous one. You will cause no end of trouble. You have to travel many roads before you find the river of your destiny. This life of yours will be full of riddles. You will be protected and you will never be alone.

I’m conscious of a series of circles working its way through my life. And at this particular moment I have come round to the beginning of my writing cycle. It begins with poetry. There’s hardly a day that goes past on which I don’t write poetry.

I learned that life will go through changes – up and down and up again. It’s what life does.

This earth that we live on is full of stories in the same way that, for a fish, the ocean is full of ocean. Some people say when we are born we’re born into stories. I say we’re also born from stories.

Destiny plans a different route and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn’t have expected.

People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.

Don’t despair too much if you see beautiful things destroyed, if you see them perish. Because the best things are always growing in secret.

Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.

If you are working in an office, where do you find the time to write a novel? But you can finish a short story in five pages. Furthermore, a short story is a perfect place to learn the craft

When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are.

If we could be pure dancers in spirit we would never be afraid to love, and we would love with strength and wisdom.

One way or another we are living the stories planted in us early or along the way, or we are also living the stories we planted – knowingly or unknowingly – in ourselves. We live stories that either give our lives meaning or negate it with meaninglessness. If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives.’

I’m pretty committed to being a filmmaker because it incorporates everything I love: music, art direction, story, and you know – everything.

Again, like I said, my life has been about being fascinated by objects and the stories that they tell,

I’m a lifelong movie addict, and one of my favorite projects is making replica props and costumes.

From earliest times, humans – explorers and thinkers – have wanted to figure out the shape of their world.

Are stories a heeded warning, or merely an entertainment? Each story in the collection tries to wrestle with these questions.

Did you see The Never-Ending Story? That’s one kick-ass dragon. It’s basically a giant puppy dragon.

The ideas always have to be in service of the story. And that’s what Scott and the writers did – they weren’t trying to beat you over the head with an idea; they had a story they wanted to tell, and they had ideas

The urge to create a fictional narrative is a mysterious one, and when an idea comes, the writer’s sense of what a story wants to be is only vaguely visible through the penumbra of inspiration.