Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It's like a candy store for an illustrator, I connected with Harry pretty quickly and loved the way J.K. described everything; she's such a visually thinking person. You can't pass that up.
The art editor in charge of the covers at the 'New Yorker' is Francoise Mouly. She's very familiar with the eccentricities and personalities of cartoonists, so working with her is very easy.
I went and studied graphic design, because it seemed to me that advertising is more honest - the image actually has a function. But once I started on that, I realized that was really boring.
Santa is our culture's only mythic figure truly believed in by a large percentage of the population. It's a fact that most of the true believers are under eight years old, and that's a pity.
The general effect of viewing 'Jumanji' is thrilling. I was able to see on film a thing that at one point had only existed in my imagination. I got to see the images from my book come alive.
Most children - I know I did when I was a kid - fantasize another set of parents. Or fantasize no parents. They don't tell their real parents about that - you don't want to tell Mom and Dad.
I never spent less than two years on the text of one of my picture books, even though each of them is approximately 380 words long. Only when the text is finished ... do I begin the pictures.
Girls are infinitely more complicated than boys and women more than men. And there's no doubt about that. We just don't like to think about it. Certainly the men don't like to think about it.
I definitely think my work comes from things that I liked as a kid, and things I still like now. Monsters and magic and museums and movies, a lot of things that start with 'M' for some reason.
I write books that seem more suitable for children, and that's OK with me. They are a better audience and tougher critics. Kids tell you what they think, not what they think they should think.
I think there is something barbaric in children, and it's missing in lots of books for them because we don't like to think of it. We want them to be happy [but] childhood is a very tough time.
I started studying as an artist, but I got fed up with the fact that you can paint terrible pictures and if you explain them in an erudite way it's called great art. I thought this was rubbish.
It was hard for me to move forward, because I take responsibility for what I introduce into the world through my paintings. So to actually introduce something evil or bad was quite hard for me.
Whether it's music, loss of something, loneliness or friendship - if that emotion is heightened in some way and painted to fit in between the covers of 32 pages, that can become a picture book.
In the 20th century, artists did a great disservice to fairies. They painted fairies in a way that was shallow and trite. So when people see my stuff, they suddenly realize the depth of fairies.
In college, I became interested in folk tales and fairy tales. Gradually I became more and more interested in the underlying meaning of it all and the possibility of the reality of real fairies.
What interests me about clocks is that everything is hand-made, and yet to the person looking at the clock, something magical is happening that cannot be explained unless you are the clockmaker.
My "mission", if you can call it that, is to connect with my readers on an emotional level and have them come away with a stronger impression of the basic message in the story I am illustrating.
My passion is writing comics and storytelling, and I'm constantly working to improve. I hit my deadlines, I know how to work with and artists, I'm professional, and I bring my A-game every time.
Children have such vibrant minds. They need to play. They need to be creative. They need to imagine. It's so important for their sense of self discovery. And it helps them learn problem-solving.
Part of why I like watercolor is that mistakes are visible, and you can't really repair much. It has to look easy. When it comes out, it looks easy, but to get to that point takes a lot of doing.
Well, I get my subject on Wednesday night; I think it out carefully on Thursday, and make my rough sketch; on Friday morning I begin, and stick to it all day, with my nose well down on the block.
I have to accept my role. I will never kill myself like Vincent Van Gogh. Nor will I paint beautiful water lilies like Monet. I can't do that. I'm in the idiot role of being a kiddie book person.
My art's not safe, I don't want it to be safe, it's not meant to be safe, its controversial, it takes you into deep areas, it's a journey, its starts off in safe areas but it gets into deep waters.
I always get scared doing a job. To this day, I start every job thinking, I really can't do this. And what I do when I'm insecure is I tighten up. If you work through the night you can do anything.
My early comics are really reflective of being kind of a befuddled, single loser in the Bay Area, and I think having kids has been by far the most profound impact on me as a person and as an artist.
Occasionally projects just take off unexpectedly, sometimes you can work away at sketches and ideas for years before they are published. There are a number of authors I would be eager to illustrate.
There are some people who may not like precision in their art. They may like it to be grittier and more gestural, more of a direct expression in the way that a painter would put his strokes on canvas.
At first, I see pictures of a story in my mind. Then creating the story comes from asking questions of myself. I guess you might call it the 'what if - what then' approach to writing and illustration.
When I was little, I loved books that gave me lots of detail so that I felt like I could be transported to this other place, or, in the case of an illustration, I felt like I could walk into the page.
I loved The Wind in the Willows. ... Walt Disney should be sued for cheapening it as he did. Imagine it, Mickey Mousing all those nice characters. I'm surprised he didn't do it with the New Testament.
I keep drawing the trees, the rocks, the river, I'm still learning how to see them; I'm still discovering how to render their forms. I will spend a lifetime doing that. Maybe someday I'll get it right.
When I go to another country, I try to be a big sponge and look at what the houses may look like and what colors predominate. I do not do research as much as just get ideas and ask people about things.
The original release of 'Star Wars' was literally the first movie I remember seeing in a theater. Four years old was probably too young - I recall believing, for some time, that Darth Vader was a robot.
Nowadays, people are so jeezled up. If they took some chamomile tea and spent more time rocking on the porch in the evening listening to the liquid song of the hermit thrush, they might enjoy life more.
Faeries are seen through the heart, not through the eyes. Remember that faeries inhabit the interior of the earth and the interior of all things, so look, in the first place, in the interior of yourself.
Sometimes, I have themes that interest me or that touch on larger issues but, really, I'm just trying to figure out the plot, or how the characters work. I'm trying to make the best story I possibly can.
Freud wrote a book on the essence of humor, but he didn't know what he was talking about. Max Eastman wrote a book, The Enjoyment of Laughter, that was a much better book, but nobody bothered to read it.
It is impossible to know what fate will bring. If you love to write or paint, you will keep on writing or painting, and things will either work out or not, and you just have to keep being in the process.
I've always loved the wild rumpus in 'Where the Wild Things Are' by Maurice Sendak, because the words disappear, the pictures take up the whole page, and we move forward in the story by turning the pages.
Underground and alternative comics existed in a vacuum for years, where money really wasn't an issue. No one would get into doing a black-and-white comic because they thought it might be a route to riches.
If anything, I feel a bit of pressure to write about less disenfranchised people, because I'd probably sell more books that way and would've already had some hot property that I could've sold to Hollywood.
I think the two jobs I dreamed of doing as a teenager were comic book artist and record cover illustrator. Maybe film director was in the mix as well, but that seemed to be an impossible mountain to climb.
The slavery at Bufford's was too fresh in my recollection to let me care to bind myself again. From the time that I took my nose off that lithographic stone, I have had no master, and never shall have any.
I was very aware of the fact that there are a lot of comics out there that I love, because I've grown up my whole life reading comics and I know every little nuance of the language and all the implications.
There have been a handful of assignments over the years that I've had to turn down due to time constraints, and I was fairly envious when I saw the finished product, beautifully illustrated by someone else.
When I first started drawing the earliest incarnation of 'Optic Nerve,' I hadn't even been on a date; I hadn't had a romantic relationship of any kind yet, so in a way, I was almost writing science fiction.
But I'm a fairly mechanical worker - I tend not to think about themes so much as plot. I want to get the feeling right. If it's moving through tunnels, I ask myself, what is it like to move through tunnels?
Time can play all sorts of tricks on you. In the blink of an eye, babies appear in carriages, coffins disappear into the ground, wars are won and lost, and children transform, like butterflies, into adults.
To me, one of the big fears of doing a big huge graphic novel is locking yourself into one style and getting halfway through it and going, 'Oh I made the wrong choice,' which is a recurring nightmare I have.