Chris Allsburg Quotations

A fantasy of mine is to be tempted by the devil with a miraculous machine, a machine that could be hooked up to my brain and instantly produce finished art from the images in my mind. I'm sure it's the devil who'd have such a device, because it would devour the artistic soul, or half of it anyway.

Each story I've written starts out as a vague idea that seems to be going nowhere, then suddenly materializes as a completed concept. It almost seems like a discovery, as if the story was always there. The few elements I start out with are actually clues. If I figure out what they mean, I can discover the story that's waiting.

I don't make plans. All my life, one artistic impulse has simply led me to another.

Lucky are the children who know there is a jolly fat man in a red suit who pilots a flying sleigh. We should envy them. And we should envy the people who are so certain Martians will land in their back yard that they keep a loaded Polaroid camera by the back door.

Any system named Dewey was all right with us. We looked forward to hearing about the Huey and Louie decimal systems too.

I am fascinated by the act of making something real that at one point is only an idea. It is challenging and beguiling to sense something inside, put it on paper (or carve it in stone), and then step back and see how much has got lost in the process.