“Reading things that are relevant to the facts of your life is of limited value. The facts are, after all, only the facts, and the yearning passionate part of you will not be met there. That is why reading ourselves as a fiction as well as fact is so liberating. The wider we read the freer we become.”

“I didn’t want to tell the story of myself, but someone I called myself. If you read yourself as fiction, it’s rather more liberating than reading yourself as fact.”

“Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open -- the only way to stop the story running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no one wants.”

“We mostly understand ourselves through an endless series of stories told to ourselves by ourselves and others. The so-called facts of our individual worlds are highly coloured and arbitrary, facts that fit whatever reality we have chosen to believe in. . . . It may be that to understand ourselves as fictions, is to understand ourselves as fully as we can.”

“There are two facts that all children need to disprove sooner or later; mother and father. If you go on believing in the fiction of your own parents, it is difficult to construct any narrative of your own.”

“What can i tell you about the choices we make? Fate reads like the polar opposite of decision, and so much of life reads like fate.”

“Stories are always true... it's the facts that mislead.”