My ideas are not meant to suggest dreams or reality, but a surreal quality.

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.

The Polar Express was the easiest of my picture book manuscripts to write... Once I realized the train was going to the North Pole, finding the story seemed less like a creative effort than an act of recollection. I felt, like the storys narrator, that I was remembering something, not making it up.

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

Certain peer pressures encourage little fingers to learn how to hold a football instead of a crayon. I confess to having yielded to these pressures.

The opportunity to create a small world between two pieces of cardboard, where time exists yet stands still, where people talk and I tell them what to say, is exciting and rewarding.

If you don't know where you're going, stop racing to get there. -- from Just Desert by M. T. Anderson