If you're so afraid of your imagination that you stifle it, how are you going to know God? How can you imagine heaven?

I have been mocked by beauty, too. But it was the beauty which cost me nothing that in the end turned upon me.

Kids often ask me if characters are real or made up - and I always tell them, 'I hope they're real but I made them up.'

It wasn't so much that he minded telling Leslie that he was afraid to go; it was that he minded being afraid. It was as though he had been made with a great piece missing - one of May Belle's puzzles with this huge gap where somebody's eye should have been. Lord, it would be better to be born without an arm than to go through life with no guts.

This is what art is all about. It is weaving fabric from the feathers you have plucked from your own breast. But no one must ever see the process - only the finished bolt of goods. They must never suspect that that crimson thread running through the pattern is blood.

Our fundamental task as human beings is to seek out connections-to exercise our imaginations.

The difference between writing a story and simply relating past events is that a story, in order to be acceptable, must have shape and meaning. It is the old idea that art is the bringing of order out of chaos.