We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.

Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.

I think kids ought to travel. I think it's very good to carry kids around. It's good for them. Of course it's tough on the parents.

Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.

I do not think that marriage is one of my talents. I've been much happier unmarried than married.

Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences. At the very simplest, it can be: 'He/she was born, lived, died.' Probably that is the template of our stories - a beginning, middle, and end. This structure is in our minds.

When you're young you think that you're going to sail into a lovely lake of quietude and peace. This is profoundly untrue.

That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.

What really fascinates me is this need that is so strong now that if you read a work of the imagination you instantly have to say, 'Oh, what this really is is so-and-so,' reducing it to a simple formula.