“Does that change things?” asked the old man. “MaybeAnansi’s just some guy from a story, made up back in Africa inthe dawn days of the world by some boy with blackfly on his leg,pushing his crutch in the dirt, making up some goofy storyabout a man made of tar. Does that change anything? People respondto the stories. They tell them themselves. The storiesspread, and as people tell them, the stories change the tellers.Because now the folk who never had any thought in their headbut how to run from lions and keep far enough away from riversthat the crocodiles don’t get an easy meal, now they’re starting todream about a whole new place to live. The world may be thesame, but the wallpaper’s changed. Yes? People still have thesame story, the one where they get born and they do stuff andthey die, but now the story means something different to what itmeant before.”

“Stories are made up by people who make them up. If they work, they get retold. There's the magic of it.”

“I once made up a story as a wedding present for some friends. It was about a couple who were given a story as a wedding present. It was not a reassuring story. Having made up the story, I decided that they’d probably prefer a toaster, so I got them a toaster, and to this day have not written the story down.”

“The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived and then, by some means or another, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience.”

“Some people have great ideas maybe once or twice in their life, and then they discover electricity or fire or outer space or something. I mean, the kind of brilliant ideas that change the whole world. Some people never have them at all... I get them two or three times a week.”

“No man, proclaimed Donne, is an Island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other's tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes—forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'd mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection), but still unique.”

“Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds' eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks. Or they are words on the air, composed of sounds and ideas-abstract, invisible, gone once they've been spoken-and what could be more frail than that? But some stories, small, simple ones about setting out on adventures or people doing wonders, tales of miracles and monsters, have outlasted all the people who told them, and some of them have outlasted the lands in which they were created.”