"I am not writing for scholars or fellow critics, but for people who like to read, to look at pictures, and to know things."

"Fiction's essential activity is to imagine how others feel, what a Saturday afternoon in an Italian town in the 2nd Century looked like. My ambition is solely to get some effect, as of light on stone in a forest on a September day."

"The real use of imaginative reading is precisely to suspend one's mind in the workings of another sensibility."

"Poetry and fiction have grieved for a century now over the loss of some vitality which they think they see in a past from which we are by now irrevocably alienated."

"I like photographs which leave something to the imagination."

"I love costumes. I love getting dressed up because it really helps my imagination make the leap to believe that I am who I say I am."

"Imagine, for example, birds. When they look out at the world, they have a sense that they are alive. If they are in pain, they can do something about it. If they have hunger or thirst, they can satisfy that. It's this basic feeling that there is life ticking away inside of you."

"While Free Choice Vouchers didn't fulfill my vision of a health care system in which every American would be empowered to hire and fire their insurance company, they were a foothold for choice and competition and a safety valve for Americans whose employers are already forcing them to bear more and more of their family's health insurance costs."