Collecting things benefits you only if you display your collection prominently and share it in joy with others. The opposite of this is hoarding.

Art is created in a state of delirium. Anyting else is the restoration of monuments. Collectors are artist that do not have a home. they have to make one for themselves.

The artist is a collector. Not a hoarder, mind you, there's a difference: Hoarders collect indiscriminately, artists collect selectively. They only collect things that they really love.

El artista es un coleccionista, no un acumulador y claro que hay una diferencia: los acumuladores coleccionan indiscriminadamente, los artistas lo hacen selectivamente, solo coleccionan cosas que de verdad les gustan”.

The artist is a collector. Not a hoarder, mind you, there’s a difference: Hoarders collect indiscriminately, artists collect selectively. They only collect things that they really love. There’s

A great private collection is a material concentrate that continually stimulates, that overexcites. Not only because it can always be added to, but because it is already too much. The collector’s need is precisely for excess, for surfeit, for profusion. It’s too much — and it’s just enough for me. … A collection is always more than is necessary.

In our online descriptions and program literature we describe the cloisters as a public sphere for networked interaction, the gathering place for students, professors, and librarians engaged in planning, evaluating, or reviewing the efforts of research and study utilizing the whole range of technologies of literacy. We go further and describe the task of the cloisters as to "channel flows of research, learning and teaching between the increasingly networked world of the library and the intimacy and engagement of our classrooms and other campus spaces". There we continue to explore the "collectible object", which I tentatively described in Othermindedness in terms of maintaining an archive of "the successive choices, the errors and losses, of our own human community" and suggesting that what constitutes the collectible object is the value which suffuses our choices. It seemed to me then that electronic media are especially suited to tracking such "changing change". I think it still seems so to me now but I do fear we have lost track of the beauty and nimbleness of new media in representing and preserving the meaning-making quotidian, the ordinary mindfulness which makes human life possible and valuable. It is interesting, I think, that recounting and rehearsing this notion leaves this interview layered and speckled with (self) quotations, documentations, implicit genealogies, images, and traditions of continuity, change, and difference. Perhaps the most quoted line of afternoon over the years has been the sentence "There is no simple way to say this." The same is true of any attempt to describe the way in which the collectible object participates in (I use this word as a felicitous shorthand for the complex of ideas involved in what I called "representing and preserving the meaning-making quotidian" above) the library as living archive.

The artist is a collector. Not a hoarder, mind you, there’s a difference: Hoarders collect indiscriminately, artists collect selectively. They only collect things that they really love.

To collect photographs is to collect the world.

My dear Irene, there are two sorts of collectors. One is satisfied by simply owning the treasured item and doesn’t care whether or not the rest of the world knows. But the other sort—they absolutely have to brag about their possessions. For them, half the pleasure comes from the thought of acquaintances gnawing their guts out with envy. Even if it increases the risk of theft, they can’t help themselves.

In the end, we are collected works.

There's a catch," Skellsgard said. "Another one? But of course there is. You know, I'm thinking I should start a collection.

[A]nything that is held only in "psychic RAM" will take up either more or less attention than it actually deserves. The reason to collect everything is not that everything is equally important, it's that it's not. Incompletions, uncollected, take on a dull sameness in the sense of the pressure they create and the attention they tie up.

I'm not a collector. I don't keep letters, or books, or souvenirs. But I do keep one copy of each translation of my books into a foreign language. Have you ever seen a murder story printed in Singhalese? Wow!