“I have hobbies," he says, smirking. "Physical pursuits: Base-jumping, hang-gliding, underwater basket-weaving.”

“My films are therapy for my debilitating depression. In institutions people weave baskets. I make films.”

“To care about weaving, to make weavings, is to be in touch with a long human tradition. We people have woven, first baskets and then cloth, for at least ten thousand years. This book will give you many ways to become connected with that tradition.”

“Not long since, a strolling Indian went to sell baskets at the house of a well-known lawyer in my neighborhood. “Do you wish to buy any baskets?” he asked. “No, we do not want any,” was the reply. “What!” exclaimed the Indian as he went out the gate, “do you mean to starve us?” Having seen his industrious white neighbors so well off—that the lawyer had only to weave arguments, and, by some magic, wealth and standing followed—he had said to himself: I will go into business; I will weave baskets; it is a thing which I can do. Thinking that when he had made the baskets he would have done his part, and then it would be the white man’s to buy them. He had not discovered that it was necessary for him to make it worth the other’s while to buy them, or at least make him think that it was so, or to make something else which it would be worth his while to buy.I too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but I had not made it worth any one’s while to buy them. Yet not the less, in my case, did I think it worth my while to weave them, and instead of studying how to make it worth men’s while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them. The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?”

“Hobbie: "Have I told you today how much I really, really hate you?" Janson: "Oh, sure, your lips say 'I hate you' but your eyes say—" Hobbie: "That someday I'll murder you in your sleep?”

“I want to make you smile. For real. Always. We're going to go for dinners, and see movies, and walk on the beach. We'll go hang-gliding, or bungee jumping, or whatever you want to do. Whatever makes you smile and laugh more. Let me make you smile.”