"I was 12 or 13 when was introduced to the fantasy/adventure books written by the author of the famous Tarzan series, and first read this novel. The idea of a huge mole machine burrowing to the center of the earth and discovering flying reptiles and other dinosaurish creatures was magical. The writing style now seems somewhat formal and clumsy, but as a young reader I was whisked along into the unknown. Later, in the 1930s, the author has Tarzan make the journey, too. How could that not work?"

"I saw this when I was twenty-five or twenty-six and really confused about my work. I was so discouraged and had stopped writing, and this movie made me excited to start working again. Akerman was doing something with pace and composition and time that I’d always wanted to do but had been too chicken to acknowledge or go toward. Watching this made me realize that you should make the kind of art you want to see, which sounds kind of obvious but was a big revelation to me at the time."

"Fellow physician Larry Dossey made a risky leap in 1985 by applying the new physics to medicine (the book’s foreword is by Tao of Physics-author Fritjof Capra). Mainstream medicine was still spooked and skeptical over the mind-body connection, and here was a doctor speculating on Bell’s Theorem and relativity, making connections between the quantum and the very basis of physiology. Seeing the human body burst into a cloud of subatomic particles thrilled me. No book has been more influential on my own writing career, and Dossey’s intellectual courage was an inspiration."

"One of the greatest books ever written by a woman, especially in those early days. Although Mary Anne Evans gave herself a male pen name, she showed incredible ambition and scope in her writing—the world she created, the characters she imagined. I love that line in the book that reads: “The really delightful marriage must be that where your husband was a sort of father, and could teach you Hebrew, if you wished it.” It was hard to be a woman in those days, but her storytelling was exceptional."