Illustrator Quotes

Life isn't long enough to do all you could accomplish.

And what a privilege even to be alive. In spite of all the pollutions and horrors, how beautiful this world is. Supposing you only saw the stars once every year. Think what you would think. The wonder of it!

If you have one person you’re influenced by, everyone will say you’re the next whoever. But if you rip off a hundred people, everyone will say you’re so original!

Pop art is the inedible raised to the unspeakable.

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.

The wall is silence, the grass is sleep, Tall trees of peace their vigil keep, And the Fairy of Dreams with moth-wings furled. Plays soft on her flute to the drowsy world.

I address you all tonight for who you truly are: wizards, mermaids, travelers, adventurers, and magicians. You are the true dreamers.

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.

Once upon a time, I thought faeries lived only in books, old folktales, and the past. That was before they burst upon my life as vibrant, luminous beings, permeating my art and my everyday existence, causing glorious havoc.

My workspace is defined by books, ephemera, quiet and light.

I don't have a computer, telephone or a fax machine there.

The Little House was very happy as she sat on the hill and watched the countryside around her. She watched the sun rise in the morning and she watched the sun set in the evening. Day followed day, each one a little different from the one before . . . but the Little House stayed just the same.

You can do terrible things when you don't know who you are.

What protects you in this world from sadness and from the loss of an ability to do something? ... Work and love.

The stories of childhood leave an indelible impression, and their author always has a niche in the temple of memory from which the image is never cast out to be thrown on the rubbish heap of things that are outgrown and outlived.

I'm drawn to characters who bear similarities to the protagonists in myths and legends. (...)

I always try to treat the book itself as the artwork.

I don't want you to stop while you're reading one of my books and say, 'Oh! What a gorgeous illustration!' I want you to stop at the end of the book and say, 'This is a good book.

Everyone I know is looking for solace, hope and a tasty snack.

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.

I am an author-illustrator of children's books - and yet - I must confess I don't do the books for the kids. When I'm working on a book I'm somewhere else - at the circus - or a rustic old farm - or deep in a forest - with no thought of who might read the book or what age group it would appeal to. I write them so I can illustrate them.

For children in their most impressionable years, there is, in fantasy, the highest of stimulating and educational powers.

Writing a story is like going down a path in the woods.

You follow the path. You don't worry about getting lost. You just go.

Faeries are not fantasy, but a connection to reality.

Faeries are irrational, poetic, absurd, and very, very wise. Faeries say there is nonsense in dogma, and sense in nonsense. Faeries express themselves with high seriousness and low humour. Faeries are resistant to all definitions.

I think there is an element of nihilism about, but I don't think most artists feel their work is meaningless.

I enjoy doing housework, ironing, washing, cooking, dishwashing.

Whenever I get one of those questionaires and they ask what is your profession, I always put down housewife. It's an admirable profession, why apologize for it. You aren't stupid because you're a housewife. When you're stirring the jam you can read Shakespeare.

Animal personalities have always intrigued me, the desire to find out more about them made a reader out of me.

A children's book is the perfect place where young readers can understand the world because they can take a deep breath and look at it and imagine and contemplate while they're looking at.

But I find that for myself, without exception, the more I deal with the work as something that is my own, as something that is personal, the more successful it is.

Perhaps all women are part faerie, for what woman can deny her faerie blood when the portals to her own land are open; when the full moon sings its insistent song; when sorrow and passion and rage pulse through her body at moon times. This is why women are the chosen ones of Faerie, pat of the vibrant, fluid, emotional soul of the world.

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.

Have you ever studied a snake's face? - how optimistic they look. They have an eternal smile.

I tell you these stories because these things happen to everyone.

It's not about being starched or polished or cute or polite. It's about having ears that stick out, about breaking yet another glass. It's about seeing something for the first time and making a million mistakes and not ever getting completely discouraged.

To believe in faeries is to step into an enchanted space where the rational mind meets the irrational heart, and all things become possible.

Voices in the forest tell of dark and twisted enchantments - as dark and twisted as the roots and grasping branches of the trees themselves. Even the most gnarled tree is eloquent in the telling of its own tale.

The myths and legends about Faerie are many and diverse, and often contradictory. Only one thing is certain - that nothing is certain. All things are possible in the land of Faerie.

A visit to a museum is a search for beauty, truth, and meaning in our lives.

Go to museums as often as you can.

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.

It doth make a man better,' quoth Robin Hood, 'to bear of those noble men so long ago. When one doth list to such tales, his soul doth say, 'put by thy poor little likings and seek to do likewise.' Truly, one may not do as nobly one's self, but in the striving one is better.

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.

You should see my corgis at sunset in the snow.

It's their finest hour. About five o'clock they glow like copper. Then they come in and lie in front of the fire like a string of sausages.

Paint your picture by means of the lights. Lights define texture and color - shadows define form.

Architecture should be dedicated to keeping the outside out and the inside in.

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.

The Federal Department of Odds and Ends: sweepus underum carpetae.

He who jumps for the moon and gets it not leaps higher than he who stoops for a penny in the mud.

Ben wished the world was organized by the Dewey decimal system.

That way you'd be able to find whatever you were looking for.

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.

My dream is to walk around the world.

A smallish backpack, all essentials neatly in place. A camera. A notebook. A traveling paint set. A hat. Good shoes. A nice pleated (green?) skirt for the occasional seaside hotel afternoon dance.

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.

Of all people, children are the ones that really understand when there's a truth there for them - an emotional truth. The characters really have to work. Children, as an audience, are very inspirational for me.

if something does go wrong, here is my advice... KEEP CALM and CARRY ON.

I remember the special quiet of rainy days when I felt that I could enter the pages of my beautiful picture books. Now I try to recreate that feeling of believing that the imaginary place I'm drawing really exists. The detail in my work helps to convince me, and I hope others as well, that such places might be real.