“The story is one that you and I will construct together in your memory. If the story means anything to you at all, then when you remember it afterward, think of it, not as something I created, but rather as something that we made together. ”

“The story, the true story, is the one that the audience members create in their minds... transformed, elucidated, expanded, edited, and clarified by their own experience, their own desires, their own hopes and fears... If the story means anything to you at all, then when you remember it afterward, think of it, not as something I created, but rather as something that we made together.”

“What is prayer but a wish for the events in your life to string together to form a story -- something that makes some sense of events you know have meaning.”

“There isn't a story to tell, because a relationship is a story you construct together and take up residence in, a story as sheltering as a house. You invent this story of how your destinies were made to entwine like porch vines, you adjust to a big view in this direction and no view in that, the doorway that you have to duck through and the window that is jammed, how who you think you are becomes a factor of who you think he is and who he thinks you are, a castle in the clouds made out of the moist air exhaled by dreamers.”

“But as long as you remember what you have seen, then nothing is gone. As long as you remember, it is part of this story we have together.”

“[E]verything is fiction. When you tell yourself the story of your life, the story of your day, you edit and rewrite and weave a narrative out of a collection of random experiences and events. Your conversations are fiction. Your friends and loved ones—they are characters you have created. And your arguments with them are like meetings with an editor—please, they beseech you, you beseech them, rewrite me. You have a perception of the way things are, and you impose it on your memory, and in this way you think, in the same way that I think, that you are living something that is describable. When of course, what we actually live, what we actually experience—with our senses and our nerves—is a vast, absurd, beautiful, ridiculous chaos.”