Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
And the wild things roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws.
It's cold water in the face to realize you're not nearly as special and as unusual as you might have thought when you were an alienated teenager.
All my stories take place on the West Coast - not the beach, but smaller inland towns. I feel homesick, and I find inspiration in capturing that.
The Polar Express began with the idea of a train standing alone in the woods. I asked myself, What if a boy gets on that train? Where does he go?
I think that if you are looking at a comic that's made by one person, that there's just a level of intimacy that I don't really see anywhere else.
Flowers lead to books, which lead to thinking and not thinking and then more flowers and music, music. Then many more flowers and many more books.
On my desk, I always have a lemon or a lime drying. I love the fragrance. Also, a Staedtler eraser, a brush for the eraser and a pencil sharpener.
I hate, loathe and despise schools.School is bad for you if you have any talent. You should be cultivating that talent in your own particular way.
Once I'm given an idea for a story I have a million ideas on how it should be illustrated, but I don't have a big shoebox full of unfinished ideas.
I've always loved children's books - it's not that I didn't like them, I just didn't think I wanted to do that. But then I suddenly realized I did.
I've always thought of the book as a visual art form, and it should represent a single artistic idea, which it does if you write your own material.
There is something magical in seeing what you can do, what texture and tone and colour you can produce merely with a pen point and a bottle of ink.
It's a strange thing to be a so-called alternative cartoonist, because in the early part of my career, I was really tethered to the superhero world.
Certain peer pressures encourage little fingers to learn how to hold a football instead of a crayon. I confess to having yielded to these pressures.
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.
I believe that there will be many things that happen to me in my life that I will not be able to explain. Some of those might be magic. I'm not sure.
'The Polar Express' began with the idea of a train standing alone in the woods. I asked myself, 'What if a boy gets on that train? Where does he go?'
To be a healthy person, you have to be sympathetic to the child you once were and maintain the continuity between you as a child and you as an adult.
A lot of the qualities in 'Killing and Dying' is sort of a response to work I'd done previously. I wanted to push myself in some different directions.
The comics work is very slow, and it basically involves working for sometimes years in isolation and not knowing how the work is going to be received.
I have plenty of enemies... among artists who resent my earning a living. They think I should go off and starve while painting something 'significant.
I don't know if what kids really want is a hamster. What they want is a dog. So the hamster ends up being a substitute: 'Well, would you accept this?'
I dont think a really good pie can be made without a dozen or so children peeking over your shoulder as you stoop to look in at it every little while.
I like Thomas Jefferson, though he intimidated me. I thought he would have been very tough to be around. I don't know if he had such a sense of humor.
There is no kind of music I don't listen to. Everything good is interesting. I am as happy with a Bach fugue as I am with a record by Thelonious Monk.
Kandinsky in Munich uttered the well known words: 'Everything is permitted!' In 1961; we still live by this heritage, which in truth is inexhaustible.
A lot of the kinship that people notice is not coincidental. I was very impressionable and trying to find my role models when I was twelve or thirteen.
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.
The life that I have chosen gives me my full hours of enjoyment for the balance of my life: the sun will not rise, or set, without my notice and thanks.
I had relatives who would go to Japan and bring back random stuff they bought at the airport or whatever - 'Ultraman' and 'Speed Racer,' stuff like that.
We're supposed to be civilized. We're supposed to go to work every day. We're supposed to be nice to our friends and send Christmas cards to our parents.
The life that I have chosen gives me my full hours of enjoyment for the balance of my life. The sun will not rise, or set, without my notice, and thanks.
The Dick, Jane, and Spot primers have gone to that bookshelf in the sky. I have, in some ways, a tender feeling toward them, so I think it's for the best.
I don't like to get scared - it's not one of the emotions I enjoy. So I have to assume that if there are scary things in my books, they aren't very scary.
When I feel a little confused, the only thing to do is to turn back to the study of nature before launching once again into the subjects closest to heart.
I certainly wasn't consciously hiding my identity in the earlier work, though a lot of people have brought up the fact that I drew myself without eyeballs.
I've always been really impressed with some of the longer graphic novels and thought it would be really amazing if one day I could try something like that.
I don't want to get pigeonholed just doing just family films and fantasy films... I don't really want to get pigeonholed just doing anything in particular.
I have a hard time writing, and I usually have to put a timer at my desk and put it on for an hour. But I love to illustrate, and I can hardly stop myself.
I do not care to put out any ideas for pictures. They are too valuable and can be appropriated by any art student, defrauding me out of a possible picture.
What was a very private childhood hobby turned into a very a public, professional job, and I think that there's a lot of inhibition that can grow from that.
I don't like plots. I don't know what a plot means. I can't stand the idea of anything that starts in the beginning - you know, 'beginning, middle and end.'
I thought that if I were going into old age I would want to do what [Giuseppe] Verdi did, which is to write extraordinary things, and to really find myself.
It was a startling task to undertake, for the Book of Mormon had never been illustrated before, at least on any professional level. There were no precedents.
I had a job as an illustrator, and I wanted to change the direction of my work. I moved to the country, and immediately I started to paint fairies and trolls.
It did occur to me that certainly African-Americans are not underserved in picture books, but those books are almost all about specifically black experiences.
I have been working for over 30 years and am always wondering about where I am and where I am going. It does not stop and become a fixed event of achievement.
I guess there's just a part of me that's not very enthusiastic about finding myself ten years from now halfway through a story that may or may not be any good.
Not all meanings are meant to be clear at once. Some ideas take time. Some words are designed to lead us on inner journeys, with truth hidden deep inside them.
Remember, as each man and woman is a microcosm reflecting the larger natural world, so healing of the self is also a healing for the world. As above, so below.