Don't read what everyone else is reading. Check them out later, cautiously.
In a world where no one listens, where no one seems to care, where hatred is greater than love, where hearts are hardened by vengeance and pride, where violence is preferable to peace, what else is there for him to do but heal the wounded, and bury the dead, in a war that could go on forever?
One human life is deeper than the ocean. Strange fishes and sea-monsters and mighty plants live in the rock-bed of our spirits. The whole of human history is an undiscovered continent deep in our souls. There are dolphins, plants that dream, magic birds inside us. The sky is inside us. The earth is in us.
Beware of the stories you read or tell. Subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.
If you are working in an office, where do you find the time to write a novel? But you can finish a short story in five pages. Furthermore, a short story is a perfect place to learn the craft.
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.
A tolerable hell is better than an impossible heaven.
'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' had a formative effect on me. I think it's one of those works that if you encounter it very early you're doubly enchanted by the beauty of the language and the strangeness of the vision. It stays with you.
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.
He thought about how the camera makes one fall in love with an image of oneself, and perpetuates a false reality.
We have not yet arrived, but every point at which we stop requires a re-definition of our destination.
To see the madness and yet walk a perfect silver line. ... That's what the true story-teller should be: a great guide, a clear mind, who can walk a silver line in hell or madness.
We must look at ourselves differently. We are freer than we think. We haven't begun to live yet. The man whose light has come on in his head, in his dormant sun, can never be kept down or defeated. We can redream this world and make the dream real. Human beings are gods hidden from ourselves.
It is not death that human beings are most afraid of, it is love.
Who knows, maybe this whole planet is an asylum, a penal realm. A place for hard cases.
There was a long silence as we swam around in the strange currents of Dad's words.
I learned that life will go through changes - up and down and up again. It's what life does.
Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.
The antimony on their features was set on silvery fire by the intensity of the moon. And their bodies, solid and quivering and half-naked, were like ancient memories of a mystical time without boundaries when it was possible to enter the consciousness of a cornseed and foretell the harvest to come.
I became a sceptic of one way of seeing the world. And I think it is what started me in my awareness that any worldview is superstitious.
A people are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves. Sick storytellers can make nations sick. Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose it's moorings or orientation... Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart larger.
He had to learn how not to let his eyes be bewildered by manifestations, and thereby learn to treat appearances as signs and codes of the interior.
The school-children were in their uniforms. A cock crowed repeatedly. Mum got her tray together. I was ready for school. Mum went down the street, swaying, moving a little sleepily, with one more burden added to her life. She was merely a detail in the poverty of our area.
To sustain your belief through situations that completely undermine it is quite something.
What if by sheer repetition we become the person we most often pretend to be? Does that mean there is no authentic self? Are we made of habits, compressed by time, like layered rocks?
Artists and writers have to deal with the element that makes the real real and the dream real while you are dreaming it. That's where stories and poems get their power.
Maybe true travel is not the transportation of the body, but a change of perception, renewing the mind.
I am not fighting for success, just to get more beauty out of myself and share it with more people.
When I write a poem, I go into a state of self-forgetfulness, and something higher takes over; I like to call it my best self.
I began my writing life as a poet, so poetry has always been fundamental. I evolved from poetry to journalism to stories to novels. But poetry was always there.
Fire is one of my temperaments. It is behind all my work... Fire is a chemical presence.
The best writing is not about the writer, the best writing is absolutely not about the writer, it's about us, it's about the reader.
Storytellers ought not be too tame. They ought to be wild creatures who function adequately in society. They are best in disguise. If they lose all their wildness, they cannot give us the truest joys.
This earth that we live on is full of stories in the same way that, for a fish, the ocean is full of ocean. Some people say when we are born we're born into stories. I say we're also born from stories.
The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.
Dad had crossed the desert of his exhaustion, had found new springs and oases of energies.
Her eyes were narrowed as if they were endlessly trying to exclude most of what they saw.
Understanding is a pure glass of water. All great truths have no taste. Hints of sweetness are coloured by the need for amazement.
His mind had been unhinged by the blast of detonators, nights spent with corpses and by the superstitious incredulity of having killed so many white men.
They made me think. Everything has to fight to live. Rats work very hard. If we are not careful they will inherit the earth.
What you see is what you make. What you see in a people is what you eventually create in them.
The dead shook off their rust of living and seized up steel. Their lips quivered with the defiance of innocents, with manipulations of politicians and their interchangeable dreams, and with the insanity of thugs who don't even know for which parties they commit their atrocities.
So long as a canvas is empty its potential is infinite… The empty canvas can become a gateway into the landscape of nightmares or a vision of sensual bliss.
If we could be pure dancers in spirit we would never be afraid to love, and we would love with strength and wisdom.
Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.
But to hear Mozart in a bombed city: how much more beautiful it sounds, as if it were composed to somehow soothe the ruins, to promise a wiser future rising from the rubble.
One of the greatest gifts my father gave me - unintentionally - was witnessing the courage with which he bore adversity.
I love your loneliness. It is brave. It makes the universe want to protect you.
