Success Quote by Chris Van Allsburg

Van Allsburg’s line snaps with the kind of candor that children’s literature rarely gets credit for: the adult creator admitting, without a halo, that approval matters. The first clause sets up a familiar posture in the arts world - the noble refusal of validation, the insistence that art stands outside metrics. Then he punctures it. Not with theory, but with a shrug and a grin: praise is “quite relevant” because it’s one of the few public signals that the private labor landed.

The subtext is less “I need applause” than “pretending you don’t is a performance.” In creative culture, disinterest in acclaim can function like a status flex: I’m so serious, so pure, that I don’t care. Van Allsburg calls that bluff. By admitting the emotional payoff (“it makes me feel great”), he reframes praise from corrupting influence to honest feedback loop: human beings make things, human beings respond, and the exchange has motivational gravity.

Context matters, too. As a writer and illustrator whose books depend on readers’ trust in wonder and ambiguity, he’s attuned to reception. Success in that lane isn’t just sales; it’s whether the work becomes someone’s internal furniture - reread, shared, remembered. Praise, especially from educators, parents, and kids who don’t speak in grant-language, is a rough but meaningful instrument for that. The line works because it refuses the saintly artist myth and replaces it with something sturdier: craft plus ego plus audience, all acknowledged without apology.