Chris Van Allsburg Quotes

They don't send people from large corporations to hire people to make sculptures.

People have asked me a lot, 'What comes first? The pictures or the story? The story or the picture?' It's hard to describe because often they seem to come at the same time. I'm seeing images while I'm thinking of the story.

I like the gizmos that transport people.

It did occur to me that certainly African-Americans are not underserved in picture books, but those books are almost all about specifically black experiences.

I think most people agree there is a component of skill in art making; you have to learn grammar before you learn how to write.

My stories are often a little mysterious.

The inclination to believe in the fantastic may strike some as a failure in logic, or gullibility, but it's really a gift. A world that might have Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster is clearly superior to one that definitely does not.

Your house is all about routine, not the unexpected events of your life.

Peter Rabbit's not a rabbit. Peter Rabbit is a proxy for the child who reads the book, and they imagine themselves in the rabbit's position.

The crudest thing I've done as a teacher was to require students to write a national anthem for their country and sing it themselves.

I write for what's left of the eight-year-old still rattling around inside my head.

It seems to me that not only the writing in most children's books condescends to kids, but so does the art. I don't want to do that.

I think parents generally know what's best for their children. But I suppose it's possible to be overprotective.

Certain peer pressures encourage little fingers to learn how to hold a football instead of a crayon. I confess to having yielded to these pressures.

At one time, most of my friends could hear the bell, but as years passed, it fell silent for all of them. Even Sarah found one Christmas that she could no longer hear its sweet sound. Though I've grown old, the bell still rings for me, as it does for all who truly believe.

There was a great deal of peer recognition to be gained in elementary school by being able to draw well. One girl could draw horses so well, she was looked upon as a kind of sorceress.

I've always thought of the book as a visual art form, and it should represent a single artistic idea, which it does if you write your own material.

In the same way that a mundane object can have a personality somehow, I try to suggest that a mundane setting can have some menace behind it.

The general effect of viewing 'Jumanji' is thrilling. I was able to see on film a thing that at one point had only existed in my imagination. I got to see the images from my book come alive.

If I'm not working on something, I'm eager to work on something because it's so gratifying.

I love the idea of a tiny window between the back stoop and the pantry, where the milkman would pass through the cheese. But of course, there is no milkman anymore. So somebody coming by the house and seeing the window would say, 'Oh, that must be original, because that's where the milkman passed the cheese through to the pantry.'

There's definitely a value in being literate.

I sculpted for four or five years. Mostly for my own amusement, I decided to do a picture book, and that was kind of a turning point.

The Polar Express is about faith, and the power of imagination to sustain faith. It's also about the desire to reside in a world where magic can happen, the kind of world we all believed in as children, but one that disappears as we grow older.

It was the case for a number of years that I was doing a book a year, but that was back when I was part-time teaching - and since 1991, I've been a parent, so that cuts into the time!

The Polar Express was the easiest of my picture book manuscripts to write ... Once I realized the train was going to the North Pole, finding the story seemed less like a creative effort than an act of recollection. I felt, like the storys narrator, that I was remembering something, not making it up.

The theory of isolation of certain tasks in certain hemispheres of the brain suggests I shouldn't even be able to speak, never mind write.

Brainstorming, for me, takes place in my bed at night between the time I turn out my lights and I finally fall asleep. It is not a very violent storm, but what's happening is I am just thinking about different ideas and maybe things I've seen that day that I think might make a good story.

Some artists claim praise is irrelevant in measuring the success of art, but I think it's quite relevant. Besides, it makes me feel great.

Growing up in the 1950s, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, boys were supposed to be athletic.

I don't know if what kids really want is a hamster. What they want is a dog. So the hamster ends up being a substitute: 'Well, would you accept this?'

I think it's difficult to forget things that are unresolved.

I've heard stories about authors filled with this kind of Lotto-winner hubris. I'm a Dutch boy from the Midwest. We don't have hubris.

What kids are exposed to on television is more frightening and horrifying than what they see in my books.

As much as I'd like to meet the tooth fairy on an evening walk, I don't really believe it can happen.

It's not in the interest of the artist to think of his market.

I'm not surprised that my books appeal to adults.

I don't like to get scared - it's not one of the emotions I enjoy. So I have to assume that if there are scary things in my books, they aren't very scary.

My ideas are not meant to suggest dreams or reality, but a surreal quality.

Book lovers love books!" her mother announced. "There's romance about the books- even having them seems to have a kind of excitement."
from Mr. Linden's Library by Walter Dean Myers

If you don't know where you're going, stop racing to get there.
from Just Desert by M. T. Anderson

I don't like to travel. Yet all my books seem to involve a journey.

I pore over every word on the cereal box at breakfast, often more than once. You can ask me anything about shredded wheat.

'The Polar Express' began with the idea of a train standing alone in the woods. I asked myself, 'What if a boy gets on that train? Where does he go?'

I think, for the most part, our culture embraces that artists are born, not made.