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.

To put down an ideogram of a table so that people will recognize it as a table is not the work of a painter but to sense it for a moment as a magic carpet with a leg hanging down at each corner is the beginning of a painter's imagination.

Imagination is the true magic carpet.

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.

But then there are magical beautiful things in the world. There's incredible acts of kindness and bravery and in the most unlikely places and it gives you hope.

I'm a firm believer that lighting affects mood and twinkly lights on strings bring something magical to occasions ranging from concerts to weddings though I'm fond of using them as year-round home decor. There's a reason why they're sometimes called fairy lights. When the night is right there aren't any strings at all.

Home is a name a word it is a strong one stronger than magician ever spoke or spirit ever answered to in the strongest conjuration.

Walking is magic. Can't recommend it highly enough. I read that Plato and Aristotle did much of their brilliant thinking together while ambulating. The movement the meditation the health of the blood pumping and the rhythm of footsteps...this is a primal way to connect with one's deeper self.

My grandmother had six kids - one died as an infant - and she was dirt-poor and all her kids got an education. And my mom grew up poor. And they both worked so hard and cultivated so much of their own happiness. I wanted to have that like an amulet. Not like armor but like a magic feather. Like Dumbo's magic feather.

I love my family and I had a very wonderful magical childhood. But New Jersey was actually a very cold place. There was such an intense concentration of wealth and such a low concentration of any actual human happiness.