“Creativity. Taking something enormously strange and somehow making it strangely familiar.”

“We are only moments away from the past. But it only takes a moment for everything to change, for the world to wobble on its axis and make the familiar strange.”

“The writer who possesses the creative gift of fantasy owns something of which he is not always master; something that, at times, strangely wills and works for itself.”

“The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.”

“The road to wisdom is paved with excess. The mark of a true writer is their ability to mystify the familiar and familiarize the strange.”

“Philosophy, beginning in wonder, as Plato and Aristotle said, is able to fancy everything different from what it is. It sees the familiar as if it were strange, and the strange as if it were familiar. It can take things up and lay them down again. It rouses us from our native dogmatic slumber and breaks up our caked prejudices.”