Everything has a meaning, if only we could read it.

Gradually, at various points in our childhoods, we discover different forms of conviction. There's the rock-hard certainty of personal experience ("I put my finger in the fire and it hurt,"), which is probably the earliest kind we learn. Then there's the logically convincing, which we probably come to first through maths, in the context of Pythagoras's theorem or something similar, and which, if we first encounter it at exactly the right moment, bursts on our minds like sunrise with the whole universe playing a great chord of C Major.

For every once upon a time there must be a story to follow, because if a story doesn't, something else will, and it might not be as harmless as a story.

I practiced on the greatest model of storytelling we've got, which is "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey." I told those stories many, many times.

Disney is a huge presence when it comes to fairy tales because he’s made of them such brilliant artifacts in terms of movie-making. But it’s very hard to ignore what he’s done to them. I'm not interested in denigrating Disney or even commenting on him very much. I'm more interested in seeing what I can do with the stories myself.

Everything means something.

No one has the right to live without being shocked.