Collector's Mindset Quotes

My wife, when I met her, she had a remarkable record collection. And they were all still in their sleeves! I couldn't believe it. She took care of her records. Rachmaninov, Beefheart. For me, most of my records were out of their sleeves and in a drawer somewhere. I married a record collection.

A library represents the mind of its collector, his fancies and foibles, his strength and weakness, his prejudices and preferences. Particularly is this the case if, to the character of a collector, he adds - or tries to add - the qualities of a student who wishes to know the books and the lives of the men who wrote them. The friendships of his life, the phases of his growth, the vagaries of his mind, all are represented.

If I like it, I say it's mine. If I don't I say it's a fake.

A bibliophile has approximately the same relationship to literature as a philatelist to geography.

A library represents the mind of its collector, fancies and foibles, strengths and weaknesses, prejudices and preferences.

A real collector does not sell.

Collectors become obsessive and then addicted. You become addicted to art and you can't live without it.

I collect skulls; I think that a beautiful skull is a really good gift for a guy.

My Picassos and Ferraris - those are kind of just toys. Those aren't the things that matter. What matters in the car collecting or the art collecting is to learn about it, and then actually not the acquisition but to put them into a collection that I think is curated. You know, so something of me in the collection that the artist actually created the work. If I was going to collect art, it had to be something of me, my eye, things that appeal to me so when I looked at it, it would really look like a collection, not just an accumulation of stuff.

I'm at like 325 pairs right now, give or take. But I've given away about 200 pairs of sneakers. I'm not as big of a collector as I used to be, because I think the game just got weird. Everybody likes to collect now, so it's kind of corny. But I got the essentials.

I guess in my own egotistical way I like to create my own library of Batman books that doesn't run contrary to a single thing that has been published before, but it also stands on its own.

Collecting is my passion.

I love photography and first editions. I have that in my genes. My father was an archivist.

Once we start collecting, the more you have, the more it gets valuable and that will stop us from responding to the present and taking on new ideas what the artists are doing now.

I'm very, very specific about sneakers. I've always been a fan. It's not just certain brands, it's also the model of the shoe, the cut of the shoe, the colorway of the shoe. Someone will say, "Hey, this is the Air Jordan this." And I'm like, "Yeah, but that's not as rare as this Air Jordan, in this colorway." It gets very specific - it's the make, the model, the colorway. As a kid, I always wanted to have sneakers, but I didn't always get the ones that I wanted. So now, I'm reliving my childhood through my feet.

I'm a compulsive sneaker collector, mostly limited edition.