"My ideas are not meant to suggest dreams or reality, but a surreal quality." — Chris Van Allsburg

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

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.

Santa is our culture's only mythic figure truly believed in by a large percentage of the population. It's a fact that most of the true believers are under eight years old, and that's a pity.