All the intelligence and talent in the world can't make a singer. The voice is a wild thing. It can't be bred in captivity. It is a sport like the silver fox. It happens.

Learning how to be still to really be still and let life happen - that stillness becomes a radiance.

Heaven knows I've exposed myself in my novels through the use of fantasy and imagination... now my new book is about what really happened to me... not my heroines.

The Polar Express is about faith and the power of imagination to sustain faith. It's also about the desire to reside in a world where magic can happen the kind of world we all believed in as children but one that disappears as we grow older.

In many cases your imagination is much more effective than what can be shown. It primes you to know something is about to happen - the anticipation and anxiety is worse than what ends up happening.

Charles Laughton who's a great hero of mine only ever made one film and it happens to be one of the great films ever which is 'The Night of the Hunter.' It's full of his kind of imagination and creation and how you do things and just in the way he used the studio I just thought it was a fantastical way of using the studio.

There is only one admirable form of the imagination: the imagination that is so intense that it creates a new reality that it makes things happen.

Some stories are true that never happened.

I used to lie in bed in my flat and imagine what would happen if there was a zombie attack.

If a dog doesn't put you first where are you both? In what relation? A dog needs God. It lives by your glances your wishes. It even shares your humor. This happens about the fifth year. If it doesn't happen you are only keeping an animal.

When they see those fourteen lights they're looking at a miracle. And deep down they feel that whatever's going to happen there will be someone there to help them. And that fills them with hope.

In live action movies you just hope that everything works. Because the actor may had a bad morning and doesn't play good or accidents happen continuously. Many things contradict what you are trying to say. But in cartoons nothing contradict what you want to say.

You travel with the hope that something unexpected will happen. It has to do with enjoying being lost and figuring it out and the satisfaction. I always get a little disappointed when I know too well where I'm going or when I've lived in a place so long that there's no chance I could possibly get lost.

I hope telling stories though 'Making a Difference' - as in my academic work and nonprofit work - will help me to live my grandmother's adage of 'Life is not about what happens to you but about what you do with what happens to you.'

I am not afraid of dying. I have lived longer than most people in the world. What scares me is to have a body that works but a brain that is waving goodbye. If that happens I hope I die quickly.

I don't think I'm a great songwriter but I think I've learned a lot about it and I don't think there's any one way to do it. I don't think I can control it at all. I can just kind of hope that it happens.

I know we can't always know what medical surprises may happen during childbirth. But my hope is to go fully natural - no epidural no interventions. Wish me luck.