I had been a reporter for 15 years when I set out to write my first novel. I knew how to research an article or profile a subject - skills that I assumed would be useless when it came to fiction. It was from my imagination that the characters in my story would emerge.

He brought imagination to the story of the Creation.

You'd have to have one hell of an imagination to completely make up a story but historians are very anal about what they think should be portrayed on screen. Thankfully they don't make movies we do.

I don't necessarily start with the beginning of the book. I just start with the part of the story that's most vivid in my imagination and work forward and backward from there.

My favorite literature to read is fairly dry history. I like the framework and my imagination can do the rest.

I look back into past history the stored experiences or products of the imagination. I look no further forward than the evening.

Someone once said that history has more imagination than all the scenario writers in the Pentagon and we have a lot of scenario writers here. No one ever wrote a scenario for commercial airliners crashing into the World Trade Center.

I surrendered to a world of my imagination reenacting all those wonderful tales my father would read aloud to me. I became a very active reader especially history and Shakespeare.

I know how fiction matters to me because if I want to express myself I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me it's not imagination. It's just a way of watching.

Growing up I didn't have a lot of toys and personal entertainment depended on individual ingenuity and imagination - think up a story and go live it for an afternoon.