Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm German, after all.
I'm structured with time.
I do like to be surprised.
In some ways I'm very structured.
I think we're conditioned by watching movies.
I don't like things to be static when I'm working.
I don't want to make myself sound that spontaneous, because I'm not.
I know if I did that [career as painter] all the time I would get tired of it.
I knew what infinity was. Being a previous art student, I knew about some art concepts.
I generally have an idea where I want to go, but I don't know how I'm going to get there.
If I could make a career out of drawing little girls hiding in corners, I would do really well.
I don't feel like it's something I invented myself, rather something I absorbed and continue to do.
By the time I finished the book [All Alone in the Universe], Robin Roy was saying, "More pictures!"
With most of my books, there are some parts that pop up right away, and other parts I have to wait for.
Some of it just involved thinking about, for example, the different kinds of science, what chemistry is.
I love that when you're writing your mind is sort of figuring things out on its own, without you directing it.
A long time ago, I had an idea to make a book for preschoolers who had older siblings who were going to school.
The morning time is also a time when I look at what I did yesterday. That's often a jumping-off point for today.
I [drinking coffee] for about an hour, I get dressed and go down in my studio, and that's a different kind of working.
I had a general outline of subjects. The way I start my days is my husband brings me a thermos of coffee up to the bedroom.
I started thinking about [ what book is going to go next] when I was working on As Easy as Falling Off the Face of the Earth.
In the bedroom time I have generated thoughts, and then in the studio I take those thoughts and try to shape them into something.
I do love that discovery of when you're trying to figure out how to make something work, and it happens in a way that you didn't predict.
I felt ten years old and a thousand years old, but I didn't know how to be my own age. I had never felt that way before, but now I feel like that a lot.
One of my favorite moments in that book [As Easy as Falling Off the Face of the Earth] was when something happened that I had no idea was going to happen.
We had a dog, Lucky, who was fourteen years old. For the last year of his life, I would take him on these walks that were long but didn't cover much distance.
Ideas mostly come from the work itself. Often when I'm drawing, the words will be bouncing around in my head, and when I'm writing, ideas about the drawing happen.
I'm heavily influenced by Edward Ardizzone, how he has people talking in little speech bubbles. I love those. And also Edward Gorey. Those are two of my favorite people.
It would look like a notebook with dividers, and there'd be different subjects and things [preschoolers] could do, so that they could feel like they were going to school also.
I remember when I was working on All Alone in the Universe, and Robin Roy was my editor. When I first sent it to her, she said kids this age don't want pictures in their books.
It really does feel, partly because of graphic novels kids read, like there's a lot of freedom with how you can use both images and words, because we think in both of those ways.
I love when I'm trying to do something I don't know how to do, and it kind of figures itself out along the way. And that means messing up a lot. That means throwing away a lot of drawings.
I made a drawing for a book I'm working . It's a little drawing of a girl who's ashamed and upset and hides in the corner of the closet. It's the kind of drawing that I feel like I'm really good at.
It's really daunting when you have just spent a lot of time on something to think about tossing it out. But once you've started something better that's working right, then it's pretty easy to let the first one go.
Often they do go back and forth the whole way, and I don't know until the very end what the last line of the book is going to be. That was true here - the very last line of the book was the last thing that happened.
I creep over to my chair and sit there with my notebook and my thermos of coffee. It's my best time for thinking, because I haven't started thinking about anything else yet, and the thoughts can kind of go in and out of my head.
I don't think about it that much, but sometimes I am surprised by that. I sometimes wonder why I didn't turn out to be the kind of picture-book writer who has stuffed animals that go with their books. That would be okay with me.
I know I'm still young and there's a lot of time for things to happen, but sometimes I think there is something about me that's wrong, that I'm not the kind of person anyone can fall in love with, and that I'll always just be alone.
It's one of my favorite times of day. I'll have an array of notes, things that I want to think about. Something will start to take shape, and I'll play around with it. It's not usually an intense time. It's sort of a playful time. But it's when some really good thoughts arise.
There will be scenes in a movie where people are walking through the park, or through a forest, and you're seeing the flickering leaves around them, and they're walking, but you're also hearing their words. It's an interaction between where they are and what they're saying that's both visual and verbal.
I had read [Charles] Dickens's novels were often published serially. I thought it would be fun to write a book, just sitting down and writing a chapter every day, not knowing what would happen next. So that's how I wrote the first draft. And then of course I had to go back and make sure everything worked and change things.