Chris Van Allsburg Quotes

I don't care whether a book is a first edition or not. I'm not a bibliophile in that word's natural sense.

There is no denying the aesthetics of a well-made, well-loved book.

I used to put black ink on the author's name in a book and write my name instead to check how it would look there - such was my passion!

I myself love getting cookbooks and novels that some congenial person has already tried and liked.

Anthologizing is a dusty sport, half antique hunting and half literary gossip fest, and I love it.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

I don't collect books just because other people collect them, and I'm not going to have books in my collection if I think it's badly written.

People - me included - want to get excited about books. Good books are a good thing.

It's great people still care about books, and it's great you can still fashion a life from literature.

America is full of readers of all different sorts who love books in many different ways, and I keep meeting them. And I think editors should look after them, and make less effort to please people who don't actually like books.

To come out and meet kids who have my books in their hands is kind of amazing.

I meet people at book signings. My record now, for signing, is ten and a half hours in one sitting.

My specialty as a collector is books that almost have value. When I love a book, I don't buy the first edition, because those have become incredibly expensive. But I might buy a beat-up copy of the second edition, third printing, which looks almost exactly the same as the first edition except that a couple of typos have been fixed.

Hardcover and paperback forever. Someone carve that into a tree.

The one constant in my life has been my love of books: reading them, thinking about them, talking about them, holding them, turning people on to new ones.

Most of the people who write to me are really clever, really engaged. They just want to say that they have read my book and liked it.

I have spent more time with other people's books than with my own. I do not regret it.

I read a lot of obscure books and it is nice to open a book.

Books look handsome and it's a real singular experience getting to go to a bookstore. I don't want to not do that.

I think that if you really love a book, there's nothing nicer than to have a first edition of it.

As a child, I felt that books were holy objects, to be caressed, rapturously sniffed, and devotedly provided for. I gave my life to them. I still do. I continue to do what I did as a child; dream of books, make books and collect books.

Every so often I take out a volume and read a page or two. After all, reading is looking after in a manner of speaking. Though they're not old enough to be valuable for their age alone, nor important enough to be sought after by collectors, my charges are dear to me, even if, as often as not, they are as dull on the inside as on the outside. No matter how banal the contents, there is always something that touches me. For someone now dead once thought these words significant enough to write them down.

Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they’ll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back.

A bookman’s love of books is a love of books, not merely of the information in them.

When you're shopping, too, you feel like you're designing as you're shopping. You're like, 'I love this, but I wish it was shorter or I wish it was purple. I wish it was a different fabric,' you know. It starts there, but then when you have to start from scratch, it really comes with an idea first, and then... you want to tweak and then you come up with something else and you want to add to it or change. It's fun. It's like an ocean - you can do whatever.