Quote of the Day: Chris Van Allsburg on Art & Creativity

It’s late December, and the house is loud with plans, meals to cook, gifts to wrap, relatives to please, while your mind quietly rebels. You sit with a notebook or a blinking cursor, trying to make something honest, and everything you write sounds like it’s auditioning for adult approval. In that moment, when practicality starts strangling wonder, Chris Van Allsburg offers a bracing permission slip: “I write for what’s left of the eight-year-old still rattling around inside my head.”

He’s not romanticizing immaturity; he’s naming a creative resource most of us misplace. The “eight-year-old” is the part that doesn’t need a rationale to open the door marked Do Not Enter. It’s the instinct that senses mystery before it explains it, the ability to be startled by ordinary things and to treat questions as fuel instead of as evidence of ignorance.

That matters because adulthood is excellent at sanding down the edges that make stories, and lives, feel true. We learn to write to expectations, to speak in pre-approved sentences, to avoid the risk of sounding strange. Van Allsburg’s line argues for a different editorial standard: if it doesn’t move the kid inside you, it probably won’t move anyone else. That inner child becomes a compass for creativity and an antidote to the numbness that passes for sophistication.

Chris Van Allsburg, the author-illustrator behind classics like Jumanji and The Polar Express, has built a career on blending the everyday with the uncanny. His work proves that wonder isn’t childish, it’s a disciplined way of seeing.

December 24 arrives with its annual pressure to perform cheer, closure, and perfection. Today, try a quieter practice of imagination: ask what your eight-year-old would notice, fear, or dare to believe, then write, speak, or live from there for ten unedited minutes.