“I lived rough, by my wits, was homeless, lived on the streets, lived on friends’ floors, was happy, was miserable.”

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.

Reading, therefore, is a co-production between writer and reader. The simplicity of this tool is astounding. So little, yet out of it whole worlds, eras, characters, continents, people never encountered before, people you wouldn’t care to sit next to in a train.

Life throws stones at you, but your love and your dream change those stones into the flowers of discovery. Even if you lose, or are defeated by things, your triumph will always be exemplary. And if no one knows it, then there are places that do.

Creativity is the art of the impossible

If we are true, if we can love, if we have vision, if we can have courage, we can, we should, we ought to, we will.

Painters ought to be mute. Speech is the enemy of expression.

To sustain your belief through situations that completely undermine it is quite something.

An inner darkness is darker than an outer darkness.

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

In the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry.

I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.

The higher the artist, the fewer the gestures. The fewer the tools, the greater the imagination. The greater the will, the greater the secret failure.

One of the greatest gifts my father gave me – unintentionally – was witnessing the courage with which he bore adversity.

The greatest religions convert the world through stories.

People like you enrich the dreams of the worlds, and it is dreams that create history. People like you are unknowing transformers of things, protected by your own fairy-tale, by love.

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