Influence is just persuasion in slow motion.

It seems to me that the civilized human being is a skeptic someone who believes nothing at face value.

The mark of a master is to select only a few moments, but give us a lifetime.

When we want mood experiences, we go to concerts or museums. When we want meaningful emotional experience, we go to the storyteller.

We realize we can't go around saying and doing what we're actually thinking and feeling. If we all did that, life would be a lunatic asylum. Indeed, that's how you know you're talking to a lunatic. Lunatics are those poor souls who have lost their inner communication and so they allow themselves to say and do exactly what they are thinking and feeling and that's why they're mad.

Story is about eternal, universal forms, not formulas.

Story isn't a flight from reality but a vehicle that carries us on our search for reality.