Shaun Tan Quotes

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

Shaun Tan

#2. 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.

Shaun Tan

#3. 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.

Shaun Tan

#4. without sense or reason

Shaun Tan

#5. 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.

Shaun Tan

#6. 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.

Shaun Tan

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

Shaun Tan

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

Shaun Tan

#9. It was better to be known as the kid who could draw than as the short kid.

Shaun Tan

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

Shaun Tan

#11. Sometimes the day begins with nothing to look forward to ...

Shaun Tan

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

Shaun Tan

#13. Why do I always listen to your insane plans? Why aren't we at home watching TV like everyone else? What possible difference will any of this make?

Shaun Tan

#14. 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.

Shaun Tan

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

Shaun Tan

#16. terrible fates are inevitable

Shaun Tan

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

Shaun Tan

#18. 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.

Shaun Tan

#19. 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.

Shaun Tan

#20. 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 ...

Shaun Tan

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

Shaun Tan

#22. 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.

Shaun Tan

#23. Today is the tomorrow you were promised yesterday.

Shaun Tan

#24. It's as if they take all our questions and offer them straight back: Who are you? Why are you here? What do you want?

Shaun Tan

#25. 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.

Shaun Tan

#26. 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.

Shaun Tan

#27. 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.

Shaun Tan

#28. 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.

Shaun Tan

#29. 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.

Shaun Tan

#30. 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.

Shaun Tan

#31. He makes me wonder what damage I could do with them, how badly I could hurt someone if I hit them with a story.

Shaun Tan

#32. 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.

Shaun Tan

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

Shaun Tan

#34. There is an implicit recognition here that important things in life are not always immediately visible, and can't always be named, or even fully understood. Others still are entirely imaginary
like a red tree growing suddenly in a room
although this does not make them any less real.

Shaun Tan

#35. 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.

Shaun Tan