Our age is lost in sensational tales. Without genuine mystery, the mystery of art, a story will not linger in the imagination.

In the world of good stories everything is linked by surprise. There only the unpredictable is logical. The laws of the world of stories operate inversely to those of the world we call reality.

All good stories are practical guides for living, or negative guides on how not to live.

Imagination dreams that which knowledge makes real. It could be said that imagination is the proto-reality.

Indirection fascinates. Straight roads make the mind fall asleep. But we all love to take hidden paths, roads that bend and curve.

Stories are not innocent. We should be careful about the stories we listen to. We should be sceptical and critical. We should always ask questions about them and seek to make a distinction in our minds between good and false stories.

We live in a time in which we are being told that the main things of value are the things of science and the things of technology. Our lives are being compressed into this technological reality. But it is worth remembering the many-sidedness of being human. Great evil befalls us when we restrict ourselves to just one side of our being.

Stories are the highest technology of being.

The true danger of stories is that they tend to bypass reason. They can bypass intelligence and go straight to the subconscious. Why else have very intelligent people in the past believed such absurd things about other races?