Chris Van Allsburg Quotes

The different bodies of my work end themselves when there's no more discovery to be had.

The ultimate aim of all creative activity is the building!

Whatever it is that I thirst for in my current project tends to turn up in my following project.

Very rarely is there any confusion as to when a painting or a song is finished. You just know when it's done.

For a dyed-in-the-wool author, nothing is as dead as a book once it is written. She is rather like a cat whose kittens have grown up.

If a man begins writing at thirty, by the time he is fifty or sixty, the bulk of his work has been done. By the time he is eighty, he's got nothing more, you know?

Writing the last page of the first draft is the most enjoyable moment in writing. It's one of the most enjoyable moments in life, period.

I think the act of condensing months or years of work down to a couple hours of entertainment is pretty wild and extremely rewarding.

To finish a song is the best feeling in the world.

When you've finished a piece of work you've had a kind of love affair with it.

Finishing books - and leaving the world you've created - is always a kind of emotionally wrenching experience. I usually cry.

I think it's natural for a creative to be sensitive. If I'm in the studio and I write something, I think it's the greatest thing in the world; it's like my baby. I just made something out of thin air that exists now in a tangible form. It's the biggest thrill in my life.

I think after you write something and you're finished with it, there is a sense of loss. That this is a world I can't really re-enter the way that I could when I was working on it. The covers of the book close it to the writer.

The only difference was one of them was trying to make a perfect cake and one of them was trying to write a great book. But if we remove that from the equation, it's the same impulse and they are equally entitled to their ecstasies and their despair.

For me, working on original material is very important.

Writing is not what you start. It's not even what you finish. It's what you start, finish, and put out there for the world to see.

Whenever I've done jobs, whether it's an acting job or writing job, there's an aspect of it that feels like you help build your piece of it, and then you watch as someone takes it, and they finish building it.

To a certain extent, just like my children, I nurture my writing until the point when it has to get out and face the outside world, where it takes on a life of its own. That is a purpose of any artist and their art.

A lot of times, when you're seeing something that you've done, you're thinking about the experience you had making it, not about the experience of the product.

When I am so intensely involved with writing my books, I don't like to reread them. I feel like that story is done.

Even though I've been putting out bodies of work for years, 'Beauty Behind the Madness' felt like the beginning.

I know the sag of the unfinished poem. And I know the release of the poem that is finished.

It takes me a long time writing books. It takes me about five years to write a book, and when I'm done, the last thing I want to do is to do it again.

Some people get turned on by my work, and it sells, but what drives me is the process of making it.

I suspect that writers and other creators are never really finished with any work.