I love fairy tales because of their haunting beauty and magical strangeness. They are set in worlds where anything can happen. Frogs can be kings, a thicket of brambles can hide a castle where a royal court has lain asleep for a hundred years, a boy can outwit a giant, and a girl can break a curse with nothing but her courage and steadfastness.
The storyline of a fantasy novel is filled with such a sense of enchantment, beauty and strangeness; it allows the writer to explore the big ontological questions of life that would sound like a sermon in a social realist novel.
The best interviews like the best biographies should sing the strangeness and variety of the human race.
I'm most interested in finding the strangeness and irony in reality. That's my forte.
I think that a good deal of poetry and art gives us some sense of access to another's voice, perception, texture of thought, imagination. Sometimes it gives us better access to the strangeness in ourselves.
I've always been excited by the strangeness of ballet, but I can't bear it when people just come forward and do a turn in the air for no reason.
To mourn is to wonder at the strangeness that grief is not written all over your face in bruised hieroglyphics. And it's also to feel, quite powerfully, that you're not allowed to descend into the deepest fathom of your grief - that to do so would be taboo somehow.
I feel compelled to make art that on one hand reflects and sometimes almost creates like a sense of comfort when confronted with the strangeness of the world.
As a kid, I loved 'Godot' because of the poetry and the humor and the strangeness, but then as you get older, it's much more resonant.
We also maintain - again with perfect truth - that mystery is more than half of beauty, the element of strangeness that stirs the senses through the imagination.
