Top 100 Picture Book Quotes
#1. Emotionally, I have no picture-book illustrated with memories of my first five years, but externally, I have impressions that possess a haunting vividness comparable only to the texture of dreams, when dreams are tumultuously alive.
E.F. Benson
#2. When I was young, my favorite picture book was 'Fletcher and Zenobia,' written by Edward Gorey and illustrated by Victoria Chess. It's long out of print now, but its mix of macabre humor and 1960s psychedelia made it a perfect children's book for the times.
Rick Riordan
#3. When I feel angry, I want to say something mean, or yell, or hit. But feeling like I want to is not the same as doing it. Feeling can't hurt anyone or get me into trouble, but doing can. (Bunny from picture book)
Cornelia Maude Spelman
#5. When you start writing a picture book, you have to write a manuscript that has enough language to prompt the illustrator to get his or her gears running, but then you end up having to cut it out because you don't want any of the language to be redundant to the pictures that are being drawn.
Daniel Handler
#6. The images in a picture book are the driving forces that tell the story. The words tell only what the pictures can't.
Dan Yaccarino
#7. A good picture book can almost be whistled ... All have their own melodies behind the storytelling.
Margaret Wise Brown
#8. As a boy, I devoured comics but never saw what we now describe as a picture book.
Anthony Browne
#9. For, to a child, the oddest of things, and the most richly coloured picture-book, is that his mother was once a child also.
J.M. Barrie
#10. I like working in children's books because it gives rise to such a variety of jobs. One month it may be a picture book, the next a retelling, the next a play, a short story or the start of the next novel.
Geraldine McCaughrean
#11. Let's put it this way: if you are a novelist, I think you start out with a 20 word idea, and you work at it and you wind up with a 200,000 word novel. We, picture-book people, or at least I, start out with 200,000 words and I reduce it to 20.
Eric Carle
#12. What art can paint or gild any object in after life with the glow which nature gives to the first baubles of childhood? St. Peter's cannot have the magical power over us that the red and gold covers of our first picture-book possessed.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#13. My daughter has seen the transition from struggling screenwriter to successful picture book author, and she's enjoyed it very much because she's a wonderful little kid. And she's always believed in her daddy.
Drew Daywalt
#14. Painting is the only universal language. All nature is creation's picture book. Painting alone can describe every thing which can be seen, and suggest every emotion which can be felt. Art reaches back into the babyhood of time, and is man's only lasting monument.
William Morris Hunt
#15. Whatever I'm thinking about has got to fit into thirty-two pages, the standard picture book size. So that's something. But the structure and the form for me are almost the most important, because these will express as much as words and images will the content of the work.
Chris Raschka
#16. Each time I write a new piece, whether a novel, a picture book, a speech or anything, really, it has so much to do with what I'm going through personally or a problem I'm trying to work out. When I wrote my novel 'Baby,' my three children had all just gone out the door.
Patricia MacLachlan
#17. There's a book called 'Where The Wild Things Are,' by American writer Maurice Sendak ... it really is the most sublime book. It's a picture book, but it works at so many levels, and it's fantastic.
Graeme Base
#18. 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.
Chris Raschka
#20. I feel an author and an illustrator weave the magic of a children's picture book together.
Sima Mittal
#21. If it's just brushstrokes wrestling around, it isn't much of a picture book, is it? There still has to be a picture. And maybe it needs to be a picture of a dog named Daisy or a little girl riding a bike. So I have to be careful before I get too carried away in the manner itself.
Chris Raschka
#22. They judge me like a picture book, by the colors, like they forgot to read.
Lana Del Rey
#23. I have to write what I can write, and writing the text of a picture book is like walking a tightrope, if you ramble off ... As my friend Julius Lester says, 'A picture book is the essence of an experience.'
Patricia MacLachlan
#24. I'm usually working either on a picture book and a young adult book, or a middle grade book and a young adult book. When I get bored with one, I move to the other, and then I go back.
Jacqueline Woodson
#25. As a form, the picture book has a similar elegance to the short story.
Gabrielle Zevin
#26. The Polar Express was the easiest of my picture book manuscripts to write ... Once I realized the train was going to the North Pole, finding the story seemed less like a creative effort than an act of recollection. I felt, like the storys narrator, that I was remembering something, not making it up.
Chris Van Allsburg
#27. Even tiny children looking at a picture book are using their imaginations, gleaning clues from the images to understand what is happening, and perhaps using the throwaway details which the illustrator includes to add their own elements to the story.
Philip Reeve
#28. A man's action is only a picture book of his creed.
Arthur Helps
#29. Writing a picture book is like writing 'War and Peace' in Haiku.
Mem Fox
#30. If kids like a picture book, they're going to read it at least 50 times, and their parents are going to have to read it with them. Read anything that often, and even minor imperfections start to feel like gravel in the bed.
Mark Haddon
#31. There's not too much difference between writing a picture book and writing a collection of a hundred poems or so, except that the bigger books take a lot longer to do.
Jack Prelutsky
#32. When I wrote the eight fairy tales that appear in 'Horse, Flower, Bird' I was working toward a completely new form of artistic expression, trying to create a new kind of tale that also felt vintage: innocent and childlike, but haunted. I tried to write a picture-less picture book.
Kate Bernheimer
#33. The question is, are we happy to suppose that our grandchildren may never be able to see an elephant except in a picture book?
David Attenborough
#34. It is a good idea to know which publishers publish which stories. For example, there is no sense in sending a picture book text to a publisher who does not publish picture books.
Margaret Mahy
#35. Because even very young people are expert readers of pictures, you can convey very complex and subtle messages through pictures that you'd need loads of words to explain. Making a picture book is also a bit like making your own film - and you can make anything you want happen, however impossible!
Mini Grey
#37. I've done a Russian movie," Claire said. "Thank God they're still stuck in realism, Zola-crazy. Subtitling their films is like captioning a child's picture book.
Paula Fox
#38. The first book I could call mine, my first book, was a picture book, 'The Magic Monkey' - it was adapted from an old Chinese legend by a thirteen-year-old prodigy named Plato Chan with the help of his sister.
Nick Flynn
#39. A picture book is a small door to the enormous world of the visual arts, and they're often the first art a young person sees.
Tomie DePaola
#40. I just did a picture book called The Wildest Brother on Earth, and you will find both of my children in there.
Cornelia Funke
#41. As adults, we've seen so much before that we often turn the pages of a picture book without really looking. Young children tend to look more carefully.
Anthony Browne
#42. They judge me like a picture book,
For the colours like they forgot to read
Lana Del Rey
#43. The novels take longer to write than the picture book texts, and they do take a different sort of concentration. However, a very short, simple story that works well is just as exciting to me as any longer and more complex book.
Margaret Mahy
#44. I am a believer in angels, though not the picture-book kind with wings and harps. Such angelic accoutrements seem as nonsensical to me as devils sporting horns and carrying pitchforks. To me, angel wings are merely symbolic of their role as divine messengers.
Richard Paul Evans
#45. I think of writing
particularly of writing picture books
as a kind of choreography. A picture book must have pace and movement and pattern. Pictures and text should, together, create the pattern, rather than simply run parallel.
Beatrice Schenk De Regniers
#46. Housekeeping is incredibly difficult with three kids. I'm trying to be more relaxed. You'll go insane if you try to have a picture-book house.
Patrick Dempsey
#47. I'm just surprised you can understand it. Is it the picture book edition?
Jus Accardo
#48. I think the trick of writing a good picture book manuscript is to leave that space for illustration. An illustrated novel can do the same thing.
Mac Barnett
#49. I don't have an interest in any car that isn't good for the environment, other than maybe an aesthetic quality in a picture book.
Emile Hirsch
#50. You need a theme in a picture book just as much or maybe even more than you need it in a novel.
Eve Bunting
#51. I sculpted for four or five years. Mostly for my own amusement, I decided to do a picture book, and that was kind of a turning point.
Chris Van Allsburg
#52. For children: I'm writing a picture book about the Big Dipper and a novel about a cricket, a firefly and a vole. For grownups: I'm writing poems.
Kate DiCamillo
#53. My first favourite book was 'Are You My Mother?' A picture book about a lost bird. After that my favourites changed almost yearly. I loved everything by Roald Dahl, but my favourite was probably 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.' A librarian gave me a first edition of that book, which I treasure.
Rick Yancey
#54. I have written a picture book that is based on my daughters. You know, my youngest one likes to tell everybody, 'Mommy wrote 'Best Day Ever' about us.' Which is true.
Gayle Forman
#55. I want a nice picture book with 12 pictures - I do my best with that format.
Dick Bruna
#56. A good picture book should have events that are visually arresting - the pictures should call attention to what is happening in the story.
Chris Van Allsburg
#57. Writing a mystery is like drawing a picture and then cutting it into little pieces that you offer to your readers one piece at a time, thus allowing them the chance to put the jigsaw puzzle together by the end of the book.
Ashwin Sanghi
#58. A good book is like a seed: it produces fruit that has in it seed for more fruit. It is not a picture on the wall; it is a window that invies us to wider horizons.
Warren W. Wiersbe
#59. For 'Picture This,' I wanted it to be a drawing book that didn't have any instructions about drawing, beyond the real simple stuff you'd find like in a Bazooka bubblegum wrapper, or in 'Highlights' magazine. I just wanted it to be feelings about looking and seeing and pictures.
Lynda Barry
#60. Picture books are for everybody at any age, not books to be left behind as we grow older. The best ones leave a tantalising gap between the pictures and the words, a gap that is filled by the reader's imagination, adding so much to the excitement of reading a book.
Anthony Browne
#61. A Picture Speaks a Thousand Words - A Book Paints a Thousand Pictures.
Philos Sopher
#62. I have a visual mind, so when I read a book, I get an instant picture in my head and it's very clear.
Richard C. Armitage
#63. My first reaction to finding Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty in a book was, Wow, what a great photograph! I could not believe that someone had gone to so much trouble just to end up with a picture.
Vik Muniz
#64. There are many books which we think we have read when we have not. There are, at least, many that we think we remember when we do not. An original picture was, perhaps, imprinted upon the brain, but it has changed with our own changing minds. We only remember our remembrance.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#65. There's a picture of the real Coach Gary Gaines in the book and he's sitting in the locker room after a game, and he just looks so much like Billy Bob, that we went to him.
Peter Berg
#66. I did have a child, and I was reading a lot of picture books to her, but at the same time writing a children's book was something that I'd been wanting to do for many years, pretty much since the start of my career.
Al Yankovic
#67. Every night, before he turned in, he would write in the book. He wrote about things he had done, things he had seen, and thoughts he had had. Sometimes he drew a picture. He always ended by asking himself a question so he would have something to think about while falling asleep.
E.B. White
#68. You learned this," Kabsal said, lifting up her drawing of Jasnah, "from a book."
"Er ... yes?"
He looked back at the picture. "I need to read more.
Brandon Sanderson
#69. The movie is actually from a book by Stephen King called The Body. When they were gonna put it to a motion picture, they found the story was a bit too strong for the title The Body, based on a young kid's movie. It would be too heavy.
Ben E. King
#70. Oh, my God," I whispered. "But how did they get my photo?
Alex tapped his mouth with his thumb. "That ... book with everyone's picture in it, that you have in high school."
"Yearbook," I said. Was he trying to be funny? But of course he was right; that's exactly where it was from.
L.A. Weatherly
#71. When I get an idea for a book, something appeals to me, it's usually a character. I'll see a picture of a female marshal in front of the courthouse in Miami and she's got a shotgun on her hip and it goes up on an angle. And she's good-looking. And I say, 'I've got to use her.'
Elmore Leonard
#72. The world is a hungry place, and Anna will feed it beauty.
Laurel Snyder
#73. There's a lot of Sherlock love in here. In many ways, this book might as well be called 'Deduce THIS, Sexlock Holmes!' with a picture of me licking his meerschaum, cross-eyed and screaming.
Caitlin Moran
#74. Lots of people want to have written; they don't want to write. In other words, they want to see their name on the front cover of a book and their grinning picture on the back. But this is what comes at the end of a job, not at the beginning.
Elizabeth George
#75. When I meet children at book signings, they'll bring me photos of when I first met them many years ago when they were reading my picture books, and now they're telling me how much they enjoy my novels.
Grace Lin
#76. Oh, sweet little huggles," Mama said. "Remember what Pampy used to say when he wanted to be brave?
Lenora Riegel
#77. A bird in the open never looks Like its picture in the birdie books - Or if it once did, it has changed its plumage, And plunges you back into ignorant gloomage.
Ogden Nash
#78. I have a lot of teenage readers and readers in their early twenties. My writing style appeals to them. And if they look at my picture on the back of the book, they don't see someone who looks like their mother.
Julia Quinn
#79. When was the last time you read a book? The truth now. And picture books don't count-I mean something with print in it.
William Goldman
#80. I propose to construct a new chart for navigating, on which I shall delineate all the sea and lands of the Ocean in their proper positions under their bearings; and further, I propose to prepare a book, and to put down all as it were in a picture, by latitude from the equator, and western longitude.
Christopher Columbus
#81. The difference between the world of pictures and the world of printed matter is extraordinary and hard to define. A picture is like the masses: a multitude of impressions. A book on the other hand, with its linear advance of words and characters seems to be connected to individual identity.
Don DeLillo
#82. I'd read the book and liked the book, but it made me really uncomfortable trying to picture myself in this part. Here's this guy who seems to be the embodiment of every single perfect guy.
Robert Pattinson
#83. I am programmed at fifty to perform childishly - to insult "The Star-Spangled Banner," to scrawl pictures of a Nazi flag and an asshole and a lot of other things with a felt-tipped pen. To give an idea of the maturity of my illustrations for this book, here is my picture of an asshole:
Kurt Vonnegut
#84. Remember picture books are the closest form of writing to a poem. Even though they don't have to rhyme, they must be poetic. They must be written so the worst actress can read with comfort and expression.
Kirby Larson
#85. Usually, a number of events will be going on around me to start me on a book. What I mean is, I will have read a poem or seen a picture that is lingering in my mind.
Chris Raschka
#86. [My mom] is quite the strict editor. I feel like maybe she has more of the old-school editing style, which really works in picture books, because you don't want to articulate anything in words that is already shown through the pictures.
Jenna Bush
#87. Siobhan said that when you are writing a book you have to include some descriptions of things. I said that I could take photographs and put them in the book. But she said the idea of a book was to describe things using words so that people could read them and make a picture in their own head.
Mark Haddon
#88. All coffee shops now have WiFi. Why bring a book when you could be wittily attacking some idiot columnist on Twitter, or responding to your date requests, or posting a picture of your foot? All of that is more gripping and immediate and social than books.
Russell Smith
#89. Have you ever looked at, say, a picture or a great building or read a paragraph in a book and felt the world suddenly expand and, in the same instant, contract and harden into a kernel of perfect purity? Do you know what I mean? Everything suddenly fits, everything's in its place.
Carol Shields
#90. Picture time travel as nothing more than knocking your half-read book to the floor and losing your place. You pick up the book and open the pages to a scene too early or late, but never exactly where you'd been reading.
Chuck Palahniuk
#91. The last book I picked up had a picture of the Stranger on the front cover. Although his eyes were not nearly as beautiful in my dream state, they still took my breath away. I opened it up curiously and there was one word written in a large, bolded font: FATE.
Markelle Grabo
#92. But see, that's the thing about movies. Nothing is left to the imagination. You read a book, and you see a picture of the characters and the scenes in your mind. You don't have that with a movie. It's all either up there on the screen laid out for you, or it isn't there at all.
Laurie Viera Rigler
#93. Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel prize.
Binyavanga Wainaina
#94. We hope that audiences around the world embrace the picture in the same way they have the books and that hopefully Disney will allow us make another one.
Jerry Bruckheimer
#95. Whatever picture you paint
or poem you write
He is beyond that.
Whatever height you can reach,
He is higher than your 'highest'.
Get rid of your talking and your books -
it is far better
to let Him be your book.
Jalaluddin Rumi
#96. This must be a good book," he wrote in Working Days on June 10, 1938. "It simply must. I haven't any choice. It must be far and away the best thing I have ever attempted - slow but sure, piling detail on detail until a picture and an experience emerge. Until the whole throbbing thing emerges.
John Steinbeck
#97. In a certain sense, this guy - who is one of the most evil people in the book - he's not really that bad at running the show, because he knows what he's doing, he's smart and he's got the big picture in mind. He's like the Godfather.
Kevin J. Anderson
#98. Use your intuition. Picture how things happen, why they happen. Don't stick rigidly to first impressions, and once you've read the rule book, throw it away. Better still, burn the bastard.
Andrew Barrett
#99. But mostly because he could be himself - never needing to bend.
Niki Alling
#100. To try to understand the real significance of what the great artists, the serious masters, tell us in their masterpieces, that leads to God; one man wrote or told it in a book; another, in a picture.
Vincent Van Gogh
