"We don’t make decisions based on our experiences.  We make them based on the stories of our experiences.  And we don’t form our stories based on an accurate reflection of experience.  We form them like novelists, and we look for a good ending."

"No one wants to buy a [self-help] book that proclaims such a measured, modest message from its cover.  To sell big, you have to over-promise."

"We tell the story we want to tell, and we live out those stories every day."

"We are, each of us, a product of the stories we tell ourselves."

"If magic exploits our capacity to continuously, unconsciously modify events in the ongoing world to form a story, even at the expense of everything we know to be possible in the universe, then we are indeed master editors, tirelessly working to communicate to others and ourselves a meaningful tale."

"When I perform my day job as a kind of magician, I work with people's capacity to fool themselves with stories."

Happy

"Stories affect us deeply."

"A good magic trick forces the spectator to tell a story that arrives at an impossible conclusion, and the clearer the story is, the better.  Normally, everything you need to solve the puzzle happens right in front of you, but you are made to care only about the parts that the magician wants you to.  When you join up those dots, so misleadingly and provocatively arranged, you are left with a baffling mystery.  A good magician might make the trick mean more, by elevating it beyond the mere disappearance or transposition of some props.  If it can be made to feel somehow relevant to you, rather than mere display of skill, then the story is likely to have more import and the trick more impact."