I pore over every word on the cereal box at breakfast, often more than once. You can ask me anything about shredded wheat.

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.

As much as I'd like to meet the tooth fairy on an evening walk, I don't really believe it can happen.

I write for what's left of the eight-year-old still rattling around inside my head

The inclination to believe in the fantastic may strike some as a failure in logic, or gullibility, but it’s really a gift. A world that might have Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster is clearly superior to one that definitely does not.

I've always thought of the book as a visual art form, and it should represent a single artistic idea, which it does if you write your own material.

I think most people agree there is a component of skill in art making; you have to learn grammar before you learn how to write.