The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering.
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.
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.
There ought to be three traditions in the art of humanity: the realistic, the visionary and the wild.
Beware of the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.
We have not yet arrived, but every point at which we stop requires a re-definition of our destination.
When you can imagine you begin to create and when you begin to create you realize that you can create a world that you prefer to live in, rather than a world that you’re suffering in.
The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.
I’m fascinated by the mysterious element that runs through our lives. Everyone is looking out of the world through their emotion and history. Nobody has an absolute reality.
The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing.
The strange thing about Africa is how past, present and future come together in a kind of rough jazz, if you like.
This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down.
The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.
What you see is what you make. What you see in a people is what you eventually create in them.
Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose its moorings or lose its orientations. even in silence we are living our stories.
Ghetto-dwellers are the great fantasists. There was an extraordinary vibrancy there, an imaginative life. When you are that poor, all you’ve got left is your belief in the imagination.
Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.
Creativity is the art of the impossible.
Reading, like writing, is a creative act. If readers only bring a narrow range of themselves to the book, then they’ll only see their narrow range reflected in it.
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.