These stories become what we know, what we understand, and what we are, or, perhaps we should say, what we have become, or can perhaps be.

All of us are in two stories at the same time," said the sandwich lady. "Life and Times. There is our own personal story, and the bigger story of what's happening around us. When both are in trouble simultaneously, when the crisis inside you intersects with the crisis outside you, things get a little crazy.

Khattam-Shud,' he said slowly, 'is the Arch-Enemy of all Stories, even of language itself. He is the Prince of Silence and the Foe of Speech. And because everything ends, because dreams end, stories end, life ends, at the finish of everything we use his name. "It's finished," we tell one another, "it's over. Khattam-Shud: The End.

What's the use of stories that aren't even true?

Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another's, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.

...one could accept Muhammad as a genuine mystic—just as one could accept Joan of Arc's voices as having genuinely been heard by her, or the revelations of Saint John the Divine as being that troubled soul's 'real' experiences—without needing also to accept that, had one been standing next to the Prophet of Islam on Mount Hira that day, one would also have seen the Archangel.

I don't like books that play to the gallery, but I've become more concerned with telling a story as clearly and engagingly as I can.

I became a writer because I got addicted to story. The first storyteller in my life was my father.

No story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old.