Doris Lessing:

"The storyteller is deep inside every one of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is ravaged by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise. But the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us -for good and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative."

(from the Nobel lecture, 7 December 2007)

Marc-Alain Ouaknin:

"The Kabbalist is not a scholar but a researcher. He is therefore constantly reading the texts of the tradition and all the writings that enable him to make progress in his research. He is always in the process of reading and interpreting. Interpretation is not a futile game but a fundamental attitude, perhaps even the fundamental attitude of the human being, implementing the emotional, spiritual and intellectual functions of man. Through its interpretation a dynamic of the psyche is produced, and of man in his entirety, who has been given the essential task of invention and the activity of opening up."

(from, Mysteries of the Kabbalah, Abbeville Press, New York, 2000)