The general purpose of a myth is to tell us who we are—who we are as a people. Mythic narrative affirms our community and our responsibilities, and is told in the form of teaching-stories both to children and adults.

I have more trust in my Inner Teacher. She is subtle and humble because she hopes to be understood. She contains contradictory opinions without getting indigestion. She can mediate between the arrogant artist self who mutters, “I don’t give a damn if you don’t understand me,” and the preacher self who shouts, “Now hear this!” She doesn’t declare

When I can use prose as I do in writing stories as a direct means or form of thinking, not as a way of saying something I know or believe, not as a vehicle for a message, but as an exploration, a voyage of discovery resulting in something I didn’t know before I wrote it, then I feel that I am using it properly.

Whether a fantasy is set in the real world or an invented one, its substance is psychic stuff, human constants, imageries we recognise. It seems to be a fact that everybody, everywhere, even if they haven’t met one before, recognises a dragon.

and that direction is towards the reinclusion of fantasy as an essential element of fiction. Or put it this way: fiction—writing it, reading it—is an act of the imagination.

I’ve spent a good deal of vehemence objecting to the reduction of fiction to ideas.

the stylistic snow job, expressing incomplete ideas with such graceful confidence that they are perfectly convincing until examined.

By telling—or by reading—a story of what didn’t in fact happen, but could have happened or could yet happen, to somebody who isn’t an actual person but who might have been or could be, we open the door to the imagination. And imagination is the best, maybe the only way we have to know anything about each other’s minds and hearts.

If we assume that imagination has no connection with reality but is mere escapism, and therefore distrust it and suppress it, it will be crippled, perverted, it will fall silent or speak untruth. The imagination, like any basic human capacity, needs exercise, discipline, training, in childhood and lifelong.