“Humans like stories. Humans need stories. Stories are good. Stories work. Story clarifies and captures the essence of the human spirit. Story, in all its forms—of life, of love, of knowledge—has traced the upward surge of mankind. And story, you mark my words, will be with the last human to draw breath.”

“Whereas story is processed in the mind in a straightforward manner, poetry bypasses rational thought and goes straight to the limbic system and lights it up like a brushfire. It's the crack cocaine of the literary world.”

“The story of one person is the story of all of humanity.”

“A science fiction story is a story built around human beings, with a human problem and a human solution, which would not have happened at all without its scientific content.”

“That's the big difference between [the BookWorld] and [the RealWorld]," said Plum. "When things happen after a randomly pointless event, all that follows is simply unintended consequences, not a coherent narrative thrust that propels the story forward."I rolled the idea of unintended consequences around in my head. "Nope, I said finally, "you've got me on that one.""It confuses me, too," admitted Plum, "but that's the RealWorld for you. A brutal and beautiful place, run for the most part on passion, fads, incentives, and mathematics. A lot of mathematics.”

“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.”

“Stories are the most important thing in the world. Without stories, we wouldn't be human beings at all.”