“Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose its moorings or lose its orientations. even in silence we are living our stories”

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.

We plan our lives according to a dream that came to us in our childhood, and we find that life alters our plans. And yet, at the end, from a rare height, we also see that our dream was our fate. It’s just that providence had other ideas as to how we would get there.

One human life is deeper than the ocean. Strange fishes and sea-monsters and mighty plants live in the rock-bed of our spirits.

Our time here is magic! It’s the only space you have to realize whatever it is that is beautiful, whatever is true, whatever is great, whatever is potential, whatever is rare, whatever is unique, in. It’s the only space.

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

We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings.

A man’s greatest battles are the ones he fights within himself.

We are living in enchanted time. With our spirits right.

The acknowledged legislators of the world take the world as given. They dislike mysteries, for mysteries cannot be coded, or legislated, and wonder cannot be made into law. And so these legislators police the accepted frontiers of things.

I was going to be a scientist.

I was told stories, we were all told stories as kids in Nigeria. We had to tell stories that would keep one another interested, and you weren’t allowed to tell stories that everybody else knew. You had to dream up new ones.

When I watch Mad Men and I see the patronising attitudes to women that are so shocking for all of us to watch now,

Politics and hypocrites is turning us all into lunatics.

A kitten is chiefly remarkable for rushing about like mad at nothing whatever and generally stopping before it gets there.

So that we don’t go mad in the leisure, we have color TV. So that there will never, never, be a moment of silence, we have radio and Muzak.

I’ve had friends get mad at me for not posting what they think I should post on Instagram on behalf of them or our relation.

I’ve had people question my “integrity” based off of something I didn’t post on social media, the list goes on. It’s mind boggling.

Women have been driven mad, “gaslighted”, for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience.

You can tell the size of a man by the size of the thing that makes him mad.