How we experience memory sometimes, it’s not linear. We’re not telling the stories to ourselves. We know the story; we’re just seeing it in flashes overlaid.

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.

I got interested in reading very early, because a story was read to me, by Hans Christian Andersen, which was ‚The Little Mermaid,‘ and I don’t know if you remember ‚The Little Mermaid,‘ but it’s dreadfully sad. The little mermaid falls in love with this prince, but she cannot marry him because she is a mermaid.

I want to – more than anything – to create a moment that people will never forget. Not for me, but for themselves. That’s what I remember about great Super Bowl performances in the past, when you really get lost in the moment with your family.

You know when you’re young and you see a play in high school, and the guys all have gray in their hair and they’re trying to be old men and they have no idea what that’s like? It’s just that stupid the other way around.

Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.

For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I’m still awake. I can continue yesterday’s dream today, something you can’t normally do in everyday life.

I never saw any of my dad’s stories. My mother said he had piles and piles of manuscripts.

I think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor.

I’m personally more struck by visual things more than musical.

For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.

Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.

I love stories about women.

I’ve never been able to understand why a Republican contributor is a ‚fat cat‘ and a Democratic contributor of the same amount of money is a ‚public-spirited philanthropist‘.

My aim is to make the poor look rich and the rich look poor.

The eyes are more exact witnesses than the ears.

I’ve done auditions where the casting director is taking the paper out of my hand in the middle of reading.

The vulgar man is always the most distinguished, for the very desire to be distinguished is vulgar.

In Japan they prefer the realistic style. They like answers and conclusions, but my stories have none. I want to leave them wide open to every possibility. I think my readers understand that openness.

Kindnesses are easily forgotten; but injuries! what worthy man does not keep those in mind?

To share the dressing room of club and country with Bhai was an amazing experience. I learnt a lot from him and other senior players like Renedy Singh.

We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.

There wasn’t much as a kid that inspired me in what I did as an adult, but I was always very interested in what motivates people, and in telling stories and building things.

Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.

Doing graphic novels is cool! It’s fun! You get to write something, and then see it visually page by page, panel by panel, working with the artist, you get to see it fleshed out.

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.

Lo! The poor Indian, whose untutored mind sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind.

I really haven’t had that exciting of a life. There are a lot of things I wish I would have done, instead of just sitting around and complaining about having a boring life. So I pretty much like to make it up. I’d rather tell a story about somebody else.

The little man is still a man.

Of course it’s the same old story. Truth usually is the same old story.

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

It seems that it had been destined before that I should occupy myself so thoroughly with the vulture, for it comes to my mind as a very early memory, when I was still in the cradle, a vulture came down to me, he opened my mouth with his tail and struck me a few times with his tail against my lips.

It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves.

Music helps me tell my story. That’s where I can really be heard. But there’s so much focus on the things that aren’t music.

Experience teaches us that it is much easier to prevent an enemy from posting themselves than it is to dislodge them after they have got possession.

The greater intellect one has, the more originality one finds in men. Ordinary persons find no difference between men.

Most people have no idea what something would sound like if it wasn’t an MP3.

Right now I’m having amnesia and deja vu at the same time… I think I’ve forgotten this before.

‚The Lion‘ all began with a picture of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself, ‚Let’s try to make a story about it.‘

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories – and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

Fiction is not necessarily about what you know, it’s about how you feel. That is the truth about fiction, and the other truth is that all science is a tool, and we use our tools not to actualise what we know, but to implement how we feel.

Experience does not err. Only your judgments err by expecting from her what is not in her power.

I can remember being home from school with tonsillitis and writing stories in bed to pass the time.

What really matters is how God sees me. He isn’t concerned with labels; he is concerned about the state of man’s soul.

I love that I can tell the truth and have people laugh at it.

The instrument that I never learned how to play was my fans. You know, they are the part of the story that nobody teaches you. I just want to do the right thing; I want to be a voice with them, among them.

My experience with songwriting is usually so confessional, it’s so drawn from my own life and my own stories.

We shall see but a little way if we require to understand what we see.

Is the babe young? When I behold it, it seems more venerable than the oldest man.

The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

It’s true that obscenity is a matter of taste and in the eye of the beholder.

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.

I seem to turn out stories that violate the discipline of the short story form and don’t obey the rules of progression for novels. I don’t think about a particular form: I think more about fiction, let’s say a chunk of fiction.

The happiest conversation is that of which nothing is distinctly remembered, but a general effect of pleasing impression.

Meeting Franklin Roosevelt was like opening your first bottle of champagne; knowing him was like drinking it.

We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.

Men show their character in nothing more clearly than what they think laughable.

When hiring somebody, I never ask to see a curriculum vitae. I feel that since I didn’t have one myself, it would be a bit presumptuous to ask to see anyone else’s.

There are four Powers: memory and intellect, desire and covetousness. The two first are mental and the others sensual. The three senses: sight, hearing and smell cannot well be prevented; touch and taste not at all.

The less you know, the more you believe.

As a rule, men worry more about what they can’t see than about what they can.