“Story is the umbilical cord that connects us to the past, present, and future. Family. Story is a relationship between the teller and the listener, a responsibility…. Story is an affirmation of our ties to one another.”

“The questions I want to ask will revolve around humans, connection, relationships, family, and stories - what are the stories we tell ourselves and each other?”

“We used to have a period called story hour. Shivaji was such a popular story-teller that after some months, he became our standard minstrel: the students simply did not want anyone else. He would not tell original stories. But he had the talent of narrating and enacting well-known, popular old tales -- like that of Vikram and the betaal -- so well that the biggest truants would come to class to listen to his stories.”

“I am the teller of the tale, not the creator of the story.”

“Perhaps it is our fear, that in the silence between stories, in the moment of falling, the fear that we will never find the one story which will save us, and so we lunge for another, and we feel safe again, if only for as long as we are telling it.”

“A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.”

“Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.”

“Stories are people. I'm a story, you're a story… your father is a story. Our stories go in every direction, but sometimes, if we're lucky, our stories join into one, and for awhile, we're less alone.”

“Stories--individual stories, family stories, national stories--are what stitch together the disparate elements of human existence into a coherent whole. We are story animals.”

“Borges said there are only four stories to tell: a love story between two people, a love story between three people, the struggle for power and the voyage. All of us writers rewrite these same stories ad infinitum.”