“Don’t overact the story of your name. Overact the story of your work.”

“Books are a hard-bound drug with no danger of an overdose. I am the happy victim of books.”

“I am very much down to earth, just not this one.”

“This is the problem with over-crowded inner-city schools there aren't enough parts for everyone in the nativity story.”

“Given the obstacles to merging these fragile and diverse forms of storytelling into a single tale, it is, paradoxically, by venturing in the opposite direction -- by listening for the silences between accounts; by discovering what each genre of recordkeeping cannot tell us -- that we can capture most fully the human struggle to understand our elusive past. What this past asks of us in return is a willingness to recount all our stories -- our darkest tales as well as our most inspiring ones -- and to ponder those stories that violence has silenced forever. For until we recognize our shared capacity for inhumanity, how can we ever hope to tell stories of our mutual humanity?”

“Long dismissed as children's stories or 'myths' by Westerners, Australian Aboriginal stories have only recently begun to be taken seriously for what they are: the longest continuous record of historic events and spirituality in the world.”

“Take your Bible and take your newspaper, and read both. But interpret newspapers from your Bible.”