“As a story teller, Scott is unrivalled; he would have made the fortune of a cafe at Damascus.”

“The story of my family… changes with the teller.”

“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.”

“Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.”

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

“To me there's no real difference between a fortune teller or a fortune cookie and any of the organized religions. They're all equally valid or invalid, really. And equally helpful.”

“The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it.”

“If, on the eve of the war, a fortune teller had pointed to all the Australian men between the ages of 20 and 30, and had predicted that a number equal to 60 per cent of that age group would be killed or permanently disabled in the coming war, she would have been ridiculed but she would have been correct.”

“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.”