“People wanted the world to be a story, because stories had to sound right and they had to make sense. People wanted the world to make sense.”

“Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is colour that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense.”

“At this point in my life, I don’t worry about telling a literary story or the right story; I tell the story I want to tell, the story that makes me feel alive, the questions I want to answer.”

“You don't start at the top if you want to find the story. You start in the middle, because it's the people in the middle who do the actual work in the world.”

“The essence of Medicine is story-- finding the right story, understanding the true story, being unsatisfied with a story that does not make sense. Healthcare, on the other hand, deconstructs story into thousands of tiny pieces-- pages of boxes and check marks for which no one is responsible.”

“[T]hey had to make up that story about weapons of mass destruction. Because that was the only thing that would sell to the American people, and that wasn't true.”

“People want to forget the impossible. It makes their world safer.”

“People will want you to behave a certain way, to make a certain choice because it reinforces the way they see the world… But you have to do what's right for you.”

“This presentation had lasted for more than three hours, but it had enthroned a new sense of reality in the hearts of those present, a sense of man on earth. With the exception of the church and its myths and legends, there was no agency in the world so capable of making men feel the earth and the people upon it as the Communist party.”

“I wanted to kind of make sure that people know that I'm here to stay, because this is home, and I am born here — I'm not a foreigner in that sense.”