“And in our dark days, with so many threatening clouds on the horizon, he concluded, we puff up a story like this to drug people, to distract theirattention from the serious problems anddivert them with a Romeo-and-Julietstory, one scripted, however, by a soap opera writer.”

“...For all the days of our lives," we finished and I felt a little like a character in one of my grandma's soap operas...”

“some soap opera, you know, real people pretending to be fake people with made-up problems being watched by real people to forget their real problems.”

“Stories are in one way or another mirrors. We use them to explain to ourselves how the world works or how it doesn’t work. Like mirrors stories prepare us for the day to come. They distract us from the things in darkness.”

“We all fictionalize ourselves in the process of creating a story out of the raw materials of our life. For some it is a soap opera, for others an epic, but, for all of us, it's an ongoing narrative that we constantly manipulate and reshape, improving (like the best anecdotes) in the retelling. This is not just true of writers. The story is one of the key ways we define and order our experiences as human beings: how we tell ourselves and others who we are.(from the Daily Telegraph)”

“The problem is that when you change Romeo and Juliet’s story it ends up like that ridiculous Taylor Swift song. And that’s not what people love about Romeo and Juliet.”