When we remember we are all mad the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.

What society doesn't realize is that in the past ordinary people respected learning. They respected books and they don't now or not very much. That whole respect for serious literature and learning has disappeared.

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.

Ultimately so much Dr. Seuss is about empowerment. He invites us to disappear into our imagination and then blows the doors off what that can mean.

I still have a photo on my wall of the greatest idol I will ever have in my life and it's myself at eight. Because that's when the forces of imagination have the same value as the real world when they're an instrument of survival: when my mother disappeared and I imagined a mother. That was me at my best.

I'm a light sleeper. I've never been one of those people who can put their head down and suddenly everything disappears. Nighttime is the time I get most scared anxious or worried. In those darker moments before waking or sleeping is when I feel most I don't know I can turn on myself and my imagination can take me dark places.

Oh man. If I had magic powers... I would hope that I would use them for good. I think I would. But I would do something pretty trivial like making traffic disappear.

I feel most at home in the water. I disappear. That's where I belong.

Jobs are disappearing from every sector of the economy from engineering to health care workers forcing hundreds of thousands of families into unemployment and low-paying jobs.

What might be taken for a precocious genius is the genius of childhood. When the child grows up it disappears without a trace. It may happen that this boy will become a real painter some day or even a great painter. But then he will have to begin everything again from zero.