Shaun Tan Quotes

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  • Illustrator
  • born 1974
  • 38 quotes

Shaun Tan, an illustrator (born 1974), is quoted 38 times on QuoteForever. The subjects that come up most often are Stories, Creative, Art and Draw.

Quotes with a ready-made image come first, then the rest in order of how often they are read and shared. Open any quote to copy it, share it, or turn it into a picture quote.

Today is the tomorrow you were promised yesterday.

Sometimes the day begins with nothing to look forward to.

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

Whenever I start a project, I have a broad range of possibilities.

I get very creative when I'm trapped in a plane and I can't do anything else.

For myself, I've kind of always been interested in pets because they're not human.

Good and bad ideas both come from the same fountain of speculation and experiment.

Sometimes I write captions on the in-flight magazines and then replace them in the seat pocket.

Drawing a good picture is like telling a really good lie - the key is in the incidental detail.

I think 'The Road' is a good example of a book everyone should read, but I wouldn't recommend it to young kids.

Illustrating is more about communicating specific ideas to a reader. Painting is more like pure science, more about the act of painting.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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