“This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down.”

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.

The whole of human history is an undiscovered continent deep in our souls. There are dolphins, plants that dream, magic birds inside us. The sky is inside us. The earth is in us.

Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.

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

To see the madness and yet walk a perfect silver line. … That’s what the true story-teller should be: a great guide, a clear mind, who can walk a silver line in hell or madness.

If you’re gonna live for what people say, you might as well lay down and forget it. Because it doesn’t work that way.

I had flops, I had success.

For me to sit down here, even as a Nobel Laureate and make a prediction about which science I think that will be a mistake.

You’ve got a big, big problem if you get caught up in what people say.

What if you let go of every bit of control and every urge that you have, right down to the most infinitesimal urge to control anything, anywhere, including anything that may be happening with you at this moment?

Then I did the simplest thing in the world. I leaned down… and kissed him. And the world cracked open.

And the woman who could win the respect of man was often the woman who could knock him down with her bare fists and sit on him until he yelled for help.

We also want to try and slow down all this foolishness that’s going on between the East and West.