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.

In the same way that a mundane object can have a personality somehow, I try to suggest that a mundane setting can have some menace behind it.

I love the idea of a tiny window between the back stoop and the pantry, where the milkman would pass through the cheese. But of course, there is no milkman anymore. So somebody coming by the house and seeing the window would say, 'Oh, that must be original, because that's where the milkman passed the cheese through to the pantry.'

Chris Van Allsburg Quotes