Jacob Aagaard
Jacob Aagaard

We always say, one day we will laugh at this. I always try to make sure that this one day is today…

Aaliyah
Aaliyah

I’ve always been mysterious. My mother and father always used to ask me, "What are you thinking, what’s going on?" There are times when I don’t understand myself, you know what I mean?

Aaliyah
Aaliyah

It was a painful time for me and my family. That's why I'm proud to say I'm a strong person. I'm a survivor and I can handle anything. I'm very confident about that. I come from a very strong family and they are always there to protect me. If I need any help I'll just call on my mummy or daddy or my brother to whom I'm very close.

Randa Abdel-Fattah
Randa Abdel-Fattah

The world of adolescence was all I was interested in exploring, I suppose because there is no other period in your life when you feel as intensely. Love, hate, jealousy, loyalty: I remember the power of these emotions as a teenager and how navigating questions of identity at the same time was truly terrifying and exhilarating. Writing in that moment of a person’s life has always felt so right to

me.

J. J. Abrams
J. J. Abrams

The most exciting thing for me is crossing that bridge between something we know is real and something that is extraordinary. The thing for me has always been how you cross that bridge.

J. J. Abrams
J. J. Abrams

Of course there is a monkey. There is always a monkey.

J. J. Abrams
J. J. Abrams

When I was a kid and saw Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope for the first time, it blew my mind and around the same time, I had friends who were huge fans of Star Trek and I don’t know if I was smart enough to get it, or patient enough. What I loved about Star Wars was the visceral energy of it, the clarity of it, the kind of innocence and big heart of it. Star Trek always felt a little bit more

sophisticated and philosophical, debating moral dilemmas and things that were theoretically interesting, but for some reason I couldn’t get on board. It really took working with all these guys and actually working on Star Trek for me to fall in love with that.

M. H. Abrams
M. H. Abrams

John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. I like to read Archie Ammons, my great friend. And Harold Bloom, another former student.

M. H. Abrams
M. H. Abrams

He always violated your expectations. … He was a character.

M. H. Abrams
M. H. Abrams

I've always been surprised at the degree of success of The Mirror and the Lamp and the range and duration of esteem for it. … I had no reason to expect in 1953 that it would appeal to more than a specialized group interested in literary criticism. I think one of the reasons why it's been of interest to a broad spectrum of readers is because one of its emphases was on the role of metaphors in

steering human thinking. It was a very early book to insist on the role of metaphors in cognition, as well as in imaginative literature — to claim that key metaphors help determine what and how we perceive and how we think about our perceptions. … Natural Supernaturalism is quite well known and even used as a textbook, but it never seems to have attracted the acclaim of its predecessor.