A walk through the storage facility of the community museum where I worked might easily have convinced you that people in the past wore only wedding dresses, carried silver candlesticks, and played with porcelain dolls.

People didn't just wear wedding dresses in the past. They also wore plain cotton shifts beneath them. As pretty as the dresses might be, and as lovely as they might look on display, if a museum doesn't hang the shifts beside them or acknowledge that the shifts existed, that exhibit's incomplete.

Even if you can't afford to travel the world, you can take your children to the museum, zoo or local park. And don't be afraid to take them to grown-up spots. Eating out in a restaurant teaches children how to be quiet and polite and gives them the pleasure of knowing you trust them to behave.

People come to museums for storytelling and engagement, and the technology needs to facilitate that.

The best museums and museum exhibits about science or technology give you the feeling that, hey, this is interesting, but maybe I could do something here, too.

Museums provide places of relaxation and inspiration. And most importantly, they are a place of authenticity. We live in a world of reproductions - the objects in museums are real. It's a way to get away from the overload of digital technology.

My mother was a teacher, and when she wanted to show me art and literature and science, she'd take me to museums, parks and free exhibitions.

How does one measure the success of a museum?

Museums are like sports stadiums, hotels and hospitals: they are in the category of captive-audience dining.

What other people may find in poetry or art museums, I find in the flight of a good drive.

I long ago ran out of bookshelf space and so, like a museum with its art, simply rotate my books from the boxes to the shelves and back again.

When I die there may be a paragraph or two in the newspapers. My name will linger in the British Museum Reading Room catalogue for a space at the head of a long list of books for which no one will ever ask.

When I was younger, I'd go to the Museum of Television and Radio in New York and watch this beautiful clip of Billie Holiday playing with a bassist, a pianist and Gerry Mulligan, who was a friend of mine, on baritone sax. At one point, she looks over at Gerry, and they just smile. When those moments happen, it's just lovely.

A sad fact of life lately at the Museum of Modern Art is that when it comes to group shows of contemporary painting from the collection, the bar has been set pretty low.

I find it a bit sad that there is no photo of me hanging on the walls in the Berlin Museum at Checkpoint Charlie.

The 'Robben Island Bible' has arrived at the British Museum. It's a garish thing, its cover plastered with pink and gold Hindu images, designed to hide its contents. Within is the finest collection of words generated by human intelligence: the complete works of William Shakespeare.

'Northern Exposure.' I loved that show; I loved the way it was able to have episodes where somebody finds a woolly mammoth, he calls the museum in New York, they send a guy out, and the mammoth's gone because someone ate it. To me, that was everything I ever wanted to do. That show mixed emotion, humor and the surreal all at once.

Museums are managers of consciousness. They give us an interpretation of history, of how to view the world and locate ourselves in it. They are, if you want to put it in positive terms, great educational institutions. If you want to put it in negative terms, they are propaganda machines.

If you look at the paintings that I love in art history, these are the paintings where great, powerful men are being celebrated on the big walls of museums throughout the world. What feels really strange is not to be able to see a reflection of myself in that world.

I'm a closet nerd. I love to study history and visit museums.

There's probably more history now preserved underwater than in all the museums of the world combined. And there's no law governing that history. It's finders keepers.

If you go to the Air and Space Museum in Washington, you can see the burn patterns on Friendship 7.

There are hundreds of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings around the United States and in other countries, too. Wright lived into his 90s, and one of his most famous buildings, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, was completed just before his death. Wright buildings look like Wright buildings - that is their paradox.

What's the name of that famous museum in Paris? The Louvre? I went through that place in 20 minutes.