Quotes by Shaun Tan - Page 1

Today is the tomorrow you were promised yesterday.
Shaun Tan / Illustrator
Today
Tomorrow
Yesterday
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Sometimes the day begins with nothing to look forward to.
Shaun Tan / Illustrator
Looks
Sometimes
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The Federal Department of Odds and Ends: sweepus underum carpetae.
Shaun Tan / Illustrator
Ends
Odds
Odds And Ends
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Whenever I start a project, I have a broad range of possibilities.
Shaun Tan / Illustrator
Range
Broad
Possibilities
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I get very creative when I'm trapped in a plane and I can't do anything else.
Shaun Tan / Illustrator
Trapped
Anything Else
Plane
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For myself, I've kind of always been interested in pets because they're not human.
Shaun Tan / Illustrator
Pets
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Good and bad ideas both come from the same fountain of speculation and experiment.
Shaun Tan / Illustrator
Good
Bad Ideas
Fountain
Good And Bad
Ideas
Speculation
Come
Bad
Good Bad Ideas
Both
Same
Experiment
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Sometimes I write captions on the in-flight magazines and then replace them in the seat pocket.
Shaun Tan / Illustrator
Magazines
Captions
Seat
Pocket
Replace
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Drawing a good picture is like telling a really good lie - the key is in the incidental detail.
Shaun Tan / Illustrator
Drawing
Detail
Good Picture
Incidental
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I think 'The Road' is a good example of a book everyone should read, but I wouldn't recommend it to young kids.
Shaun Tan / Illustrator
Good Example
Recommend
Young Kids
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Illustrating is more about communicating specific ideas to a reader. Painting is more like pure science, more about the act of painting.
Shaun Tan / Illustrator
Illustrating
Pure
Communicating
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Animals represent the abstract notion of acceptance. Living with these funny creatures - you kind of have to accept them. It's like a test in a way.
Shaun Tan / Illustrator
Abstract
Notion
Accept
Animals
Represent
Test
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It's only a very small percentage of creative thinking that ends up connecting with a wider audience, and even then, any success is quite unpredictable.
Shaun Tan / Illustrator
Audience
Connecting
Creative
Unpredictable
Percentage
Success Is
Wider
Wider Audience
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There's a sort of absurdity to Australia and the so-called New World nations. I sensed it all the time growing up in Western Australia, which is really remote.
Shaun Tan / Illustrator
Absurdity
Growing Up
World
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Seeing your work in print is exciting, especially when you're young. It's that feeling that you have some effect on the world outside of your immediate neighbourhood.
Shaun Tan / Illustrator
Print
Seeing
Work World Your
Effect
Immediate
In Print
Neighbourhood
Outside
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Like all of my previous work - which I also hope is a bit hard to categorise - 'The Oopsatoreum' is an illustrated book, so a combination of words and pictures that tell a kind of story.
Shaun Tan / Illustrator
Combination
Illustrated
Previous
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I actually started out as a writer and then converted to illustration because I realised that there was a dearth of good illustrators in genre fiction, at least in Australia at that time.
Shaun Tan / Illustrator
Australia
Genre
Realised
Writer
Converted
Dearth
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I don't get really inspired the way some people do, buzzing with ideas - it feels like hard work to me... but once I get hooked into the universe of a particular work it becomes almost like an aesthetic addiction.
Shaun Tan / Illustrator
Art
Hard Work
Ideas
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When I was growing up, a lot of books affected me, but I never wrote letters to the author or anything like that. I'm always mindful that there are probably a whole bunch of people reading my books like that, too.
Shaun Tan / Illustrator
Letters
Always Me People
Author
Me People Always
Mindful
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As an artist, even if you are putting out something really dark and disturbing, that's good because it's opening a discussion. Always in the back of my mind is this thought that the world has to be a better place with you in it.
Shaun Tan / Illustrator
Art
Dark
Mind
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Depression is the flip side of creative inspiration but it can be useful. It's telling you to stop for a little bit. You can become so fully absorbed in the world of creative work that it can lead to some imbalance in your life.
Shaun Tan / Illustrator
Art
Creative
Inspiration
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You discover how confounding the world is when you try to draw it. You look at a car, and you try to see its car-ness, and you’re like an immigrant to your own world. You don’t have to travel to encounter weirdness. You wake up to it.
Shaun Tan / Illustrator
Car
Discovery
Trying
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You discover how confounding the world is when you try to draw it. You look at a car, and you try to see its car-ness, and you're like an immigrant to your own world. You don't have to travel to encounter weirdness. You wake up to it.
Shaun Tan / Illustrator
Travel
Wake Up
Weirdness
Discover
Draw
Encounter
Immigrant
Wake
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The text illustrates the pictures - it provides a connective tissue for me. I usually refine the text last, partly because pictures are harder to do, so it's easier to edit words - I use text as grout in between the tiles of the pictures.
Shaun Tan / Illustrator
Edit
Illustrate
Partly
Refine
Text
Tissue
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My friend Markus Zusak wrote a story from the point of view of death, 'The Book Thief.' I thought that's a great idea, where your omniscient narrator is death. I'm glad he had that idea because I wouldn't have been able to work so well with it.
Shaun Tan / Illustrator
Glad
Great Idea
Omniscient
Point Of View
My Friend
Narrator
Thief
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The audience for comics has shifted dramatically. And the boundaries between books and fine arts have blurred. Maybe it's the globalization of fine art through the Internet - it's easy for certain groups to coalesce around a certain kind of work or medium.
Shaun Tan / Illustrator
Boundaries
Globalization
Groups
Blurred
Dramatically
Fine Art
Medium
Shifted
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I like the idea of contained emotion because I grew up most of my life feeling that way. As an adolescent, people would always say I was not expressive, and they always made the mistake of thinking that I didn't feel anything because I didn't react to things.
Shaun Tan / Illustrator
Emotion
Expressive
Grew
Mistake
Thinking
Life Thinking Always
Life Mistake My Life
Adolescent
Life Thinking My Life
Idea
Contained
Feeling
React
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Perhaps the writer I've read the most of is Haruki Murakami, the Japanese writer, but I wouldn't necessarily say he's a favourite. I read him because I find his work so intriguing, but I don't necessarily feel I would follow this writer to the ends of the earth.
Shaun Tan / Illustrator
Favourite
Intriguing
Japanese
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The detail adds an element of unexpected something. All fiction is false; what makes it convincing is that it runs alongside the truth. The real world has lots of incidental details, so a painting also has to have that element of imperfection and irregularity, those incidental details.
Shaun Tan / Illustrator
Convincing
Painting
Real World
Unexpected
Adds
Alongside
Detail
Element
False
Incidental
Runs
The Real World
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So you want to hear a story? Well, I used to know a whole lot of pretty interesting ones. Some of them so funny you'd laugh yourself unconscious, others so terrible you'd never want to repeat them. But I can't remember any of those. So I'll just tell you about the time I found that lost thing.
Shaun Tan / Illustrator
Interesting
Laughing
Stories
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By itself, just to draw crazy creatures has limited appeal - if I had to give up one thing, it would be the wild imagination. When the work becomes too detached from ordinary life, it starts to fall apart. Fantasy needs to have some connection with reality, or it becomes of its own interest only, insular.
Shaun Tan / Illustrator
Imagination
Detached
Fall
Fantasy
Ordinary
Ordinary Life
Life Work Reality
Apart
Appeal
Wild
Connection
Draw
Insular
Limited
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The more I draw and write, the more I realise that accidents are a necessary part of any creative act, much more so than logic or wisdom. Sometimes a mistake is the only way of arriving at an original concept, and the history of successful inventions is full of mishaps, serendipity and unintended results.
Shaun Tan / Illustrator
Wisdom
History
Accidents
Arriving
Creative
Logic
Mistake
Results
Serendipity
Successful
More
Act
Much
Any
Only
Original
Write
Part
Concept
Full
Creative Act
Draw
Inventions
Necessary
Realise
Than
Unintended
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I became more interested in the idea of being an immigrant and particularly of being in a country you're not familiar with. And so I began reading migrants' stories. The fact that my father is Chinese - he emigrated from Malaysia when he was about 20 - may have had some bearing on my attraction to the subject.
Shaun Tan / Illustrator
Attraction
Chinese
Familiar
Malaysia
Reading
Stories
Bearing
Became
Began
Interested
Particularly
Immigrant
Subject
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I always overwrite - really awful, long bits of script - and then I trim it down to the bare bones and then add a little bit to colour it in. At the end of all of my stories, I test for wordless comprehension. So I remove the text and see if it works by itself. And if it does, I feel that that's a successful story.
Shaun Tan / Illustrator
Add
Awful
Bits
Bones
Colour
Comprehension
Little Bit
Long
Remove
Stories
Successful
Little
Does
Bit
Bare
Works
Itself
Down
Script
Test
Trim
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As a younger person, I was obsessed with Ray Bradbury, and I think his stories did more to shape me as a storyteller than anybody else - even though, when I read them now, a lot of them seem overly sentimental. But that's probably the writer that I've thought about the most, even though I don't necessarily like a lot of his work.
Shaun Tan / Illustrator
Obsessed
Sentimental
Stories
Writer
Work Me Person
Younger
Anybody
Anybody Else
Read
Overly
Necessarily
Ray
Seem
Shape
Though
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What I love about Inuit carving is that it's so narrative, but it doesn't have the temporal dimension of an illustrated picture, where it feels like something happens before or after. Everything is happening in the sculpture, and you can hold the whole story in your hand. A lot of these sculptures are small enough that you can hide them in your hand completely so you're not looking at them, you're just feeling them. I
Shaun Tan / Illustrator
Enough
Feelings
Things Happen
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Yes, we all know that there's a good chance the missiles won't work properly when the government people finally come to get them, but over the years we've stopped worrying about that. Deep down, most of us feel it's probably better this way. After all, if there are families in faraway countries with their own backyard missiles, armed and pointed back at us, we would hope that they too have found a much better use for them.
Shaun Tan / Illustrator
Government
Country
Years
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I'm often wary of using the word 'inspiration' to introduce my work -- it sounds too much like a sun shower from the heavens, absorbed by a passive individual enjoying an especially receptive moment. While that may be the case on rare occasions, the reality is usually far more prosaic. Staring at a blank piece of paper, I can't think of anything original. I feel utterly uninspired and unreceptive. It's the familiar malaise of 'artist's block' and in such circumstances there is only one thing to do: just start drawing.
Shaun Tan / Illustrator
Block
Inspiration
Thinking
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Shaun Tan Quotes - Page 1

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