“What seems clear to me,' Karl Wertheimer joined in, 'is that Eli Black believes in the myth of the artist. This is a myth that holds that everything must be sacrificed for art. It may not be a foolish myth if one is, say, Michelangelo or Beethoven. But if one is less than that then the myth of the artist is very destructive, sadly so for people who become too closely involved with him.”

“Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are the artists of one kind or another.”

“Family myths are cherished by the people who--however unwittingly--have brought them into being. In my own situation, what my father was really saying to me during that last unfortunate phone call was that I had shattered our family's myth: the myth of a close and tight-knit family in which everyone was in complete agreement about everything, that is, in complete agreement with my father. I had violated one of the tenets of this myth in a way that was unforgivable to him. For that my punishment was to be expelled from the family.”

“Love is a myth.''Love is a myth,' Grandfather Trout said. 'Like summer.''What?''In winter,'Grandfather Trout said, 'summer is a myth. A report, a rumor. Not to be believed in. Get it? Love is a myth. So is summer.”

“All myths are stories, but not all stories are myths: among stories, myths hold a special place.”

“Artistic symbols and myths speak out of the primordial, preconscious realm of the mind which is powerful and chaotic. Both symbol and myth are ways of bringing order and form into this chaos.”