Michael Anderson

Storytelling is a kind of propaganda. It's just unauthorized, off-the-record, confidential, something other than The Official Legend.

We are trying to enter the unconscious dream life of strangers, to intervene somehow for the better. This is risky business, no matter how warm and fuzzy we feel about it.

A story has to be confusing, disorienting in some way. Otherwise, it's just boring, a kind of repetitive advertising.

Mortality may be necessary for storytelling.
Does God tell stories to God?
Or is it we who must urgently tell each other
what we’ve seen of God in this short time we have?

A comment on Brother Blue: If you have discovered the radiance of your soul, if you can close your eyes and see all the lilies of the field in Technicolor, and then you open your eyes and see a world in gray, drowning in fear and silence, wouldn't you want to turn the brightness and contrast of your own image all the way up? Not because you expect to change the world, but just to keep the world from changing you.

I don't always identify with the word "story teller." It sounds bureaucratic, like we work at the Bank of Enlightenment, and customers walk up and say “I’d like to take out some Truth, please” and we oblige them “(twenty thirty forty fifty) here’s your truth, have a nice day.”

Not for me thank you. I wanna be a story liberator, a story rescue dog, a story pirate! (Arrrr!) A story bandit, redistributing stolen truth to the people!

I believe in aristocracy. . . — if that is the right word, and if a democrat may use it. Not an aristocracy of power, based upon rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet. They represent the true human tradition, the one permanent victory of our queer race over cruelty and chaos. They are sensitive for others as well as for themselves, they are considerate without being fussy, their pluck is not swankiness but the power to endure, and they can take a joke. Again and again Authority, seeing their value, has tried to net them and to utilize them as the Egyptian Priesthood or the Christian Church or the Chinese Civil Service or the Group Movement, or some other worthy stunt. But they slip through the net and are gone. -EM Forster