It is true that those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards, even unto our names.

My life is like a memento mori painting from European art: there is always a grinning skull at my side to remind me of the folly of human ambition.

If you don't let technology help you, if you resist good ideas, you condemn yourself to dinosaurhood.

What works in a story is very different than what works in cinema. For example, dialogue in books: If you translate it too faithfully, it sounds a little stilted, because we often don't speak the way we speak in novels. Oral language is much punchier, shorter sentences.

Stories--individual stories, family stories, national stories--are what stitch together the disparate elements of human existence into a coherent whole. We are story animals.

I am reminded of a story of Lord Krishna when he was a cowherd. Every night he invites the milkmaids to dance with him in the forest. They come and they dance. The night is dark, the fire in their midst roars and crackles, the beat of the music gets ever faster - the girls dance and dance and dance with their sweet lord, who has made himself so abundant as to be in the arms of each and every girl. But the moment the girls become possessive, the moment each one imagines that Krishna is her partner alone, he vanishes. So it is that we should not be jealous of God.

Repetition is important in the training not only of animals but also of humans.