Top 100 Quotes About Picture Books
#1. 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
#2. The illustrations in picture books are the first paintings most children see, and because of that, they are incredibly important. What we see and share at that age stays with us for life.
Anthony Browne
#3. I can't think of a story that doesn't have something terrible in it. Otherwise, it's dull. So when I embarked into the world of picture books, my first thought was to do something about the dark.
Daniel Handler
#4. What excites me about picture books is the gap between pictures and words. Sometimes the pictures can tell a slightly different story or tell more about the story, about how someone is thinking or feeling.
Anthony Browne
#5. 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
#7. Growing up, I lived in a house without art: no picture books on the shelves, no visits to museums, no posters on the bedroom wall.
John Burnside
#8. I am honored to have the opportunity to inspire the young and the young at heart through our Picture Books and author talks.
Julie Freyermuth
#9. As a father, I understand the importance of the bond that develops through reading picture books with your child.
Anthony Browne
#10. With twins, reading aloud to them was the only chance I could get to sit down. I read them picture books until they were reading on their own.
Beverly Cleary
#11. Gifts that are most appreciated are often associated with the country, or even better, the specific location you are from. These kinds of gifts may include coffee table picture books of your city or national parks, or mugs, t-shirts, paperweights, and so on that display your company or school logo.
Matthew B. Christensen
#12. I think the reason I'm a writer is because first, I was a reader. I loved to read. I read a lot of adventure stories and mystery books, and I have wonderful memories of my mom reading picture books aloud to me. I learned that words are powerful.
Andrew Clements
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. I was brought up in Zimbabwe, and there were seven of us in my family, so it was difficult to read aloud to us all. There weren't that many picture books around in the Fifties in Zimbabwe. My favourite was Heinrich Hoffmann's Struwwelpeter, which was really frightening.
Korky Paul
#16. 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
#17. [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
#18. I'll always write picture books - it's just what I do. I'd even do it if I wasn't being paid.
Debi Gliori
#19. I love picture books - with picture books, you can use words and pictures as a double act, even tell two different versions of a story at the same time.
Mini Grey
#20. The early readers are in-between books for the kids who aren't ready for novels yet but are done with my picture books. It's really rewarding to think that they can grow up reading my books at all the different levels.
Grace Lin
#21. You'll notice that my books offer great variety. Some are for adults, some for children and some for teens. There are mysteries, historical novels, picture books, love stories and stories of crisis and courage.
Sonia Levitin
#22. One of my main decisions when accepting the job of Children's Laureate was that I must continue working on picture books. If I don't write and illustrate for some time, then I begin to question who I am.
Anthony Browne
#23. I read everything aloud, novels as well as picture books. I believe the eye and ear are different listeners. So as writers, we have to please both.
Jane Yolen
#24. Children's books, even good picture books, are much richer than ordinary home or classroom conversation,
Jim Trelease
#25. 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
#26. I love you to the moon and back - you read that in one of the picture books you brought to my house whenI was sick. It's becoming this thing with us. I melt. And you knew I would. You've got all these aces up your sleeve - a real card shark.
Heather Demetrios
#27. In terms of age, I think I've covered about as wide a range as is possible, having written everything from picture books to early chapter books to middle grade novels to YA to one adult novel - and having been editor and lead writer for a magazine for retired people!
Bruce Coville
#28. Force me to choose my best book, and I always come back to 'Gorilla.' It was the first time I felt I understood what picture books could do.
Anthony Browne
#29. Picture books are an emotional medium. They need to make us feel something.
Marla Frazee
#30. I love picture books. I think some of the best people in children's books are the ones who create their own picture books. I wish I could say I'm one of them, but I'm not.
Judy Blume
#31. Picture books are being marginalised. I get the feeling children are being pushed away from picture books earlier and earlier and being told to look at 'proper' books, which means books without pictures.
Anthony Browne
#32. Nevertheless, old stories, old rumors, and old picture books still seemed to have their own hold on the memory of the world. What
Terry Pratchett
#33. Many adults that I have met in my time believed that picture books are 'babyish'. I hope I have changed minds on this, as I set out to do.
Anthony Browne
#34. I never spent less than two years on the text of one of my picture books, even though each of them is approximately 380 words long. Only when the text is finished ... do I begin the pictures.
Maurice Sendak
#35. I read The Stinky Cheese Man as an adult. I missed that book when I was a kid. I grew up mostly with books bought at yard sales, picture books from the fifties to 1975, which is really a lucky thing.
Mac Barnett
#36. I love writing picture books and story books because of the exciting, visual life that artists and illustrators give to them. And most of all, I love writing novels because of the inner, emotional journeys that they take me on. Hopefully, the reader comes with me!
Berlie Doherty
#37. All really good picture books are written to be read five hundred times
Rosemary Wells
#38. I've read way too much on the overused/misunderstood buzzwords "Show, don't tell!" that I'm convinced all novels should now be picture books
Michael Kroft
#39. 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
#40. It struck me that when we read picture books to children, we parents, and people as a whole, do not appear in them very much, and that they are more constructed to be a world of children and animals.
Mamoru Hosoda
#41. It did occur to me that certainly African-Americans are not underserved in picture books, but those books are almost all about specifically black experiences.
Chris Van Allsburg
#42. I think picture books should stretch children. I think they should be full of wonderful, amazing words.
Jane Yolen
#43. I didn't have picture books - there weren't many around when I was a child.
Anthony Browne
#44. Maurice Sendak is the daddy of them all when it comes to picture books - the words, the rhythm, the psychology, the design.
Anthony Browne
#45. And that's why any of my picture books exist: They all seem to be built backwards from a simple, emotionally optimistic story beat.
Berkeley Breathed
#46. My son craves picture books about Transformers and Ninja Turtles and the Hulk; they show one fantastic creature smashing or zapping another into smithereens on page after page. They are dull and ugly and show no interesting stories or models of conflict resolution or character building.
Russell Smith
#47. Picture books are the distillation of an idea, and you have to use just the right words. I love that, and I try to use a lot of action verbs.
Denise Fleming
#48. She would sit with picture books in her little lap before she even knew how to read, studying the writing as though all the mystery and wonder of the world were contained in the strange, indecipherable symbols.
Molly Ringwald
#50. The great thing about making picture books is that you can make absolutely anything you want happen. It's a bit like making a film, but you don't need lots of money for actors and costumes - you just need pens, paper, and your imagination.
Mini Grey
#51. I learned to read when I was three, so I skipped right over picture books and didn't learn to appreciate art in books until much later.
Mitali Perkins
#52. I like the idea of being involved in pictures that can entertain the entire family and can stimulate youngsters into looking at picture books. There's nothing wrong with that.
Nicolas Cage
#53. When I was little there was a picture in one of our books, a dark place into which a single weak ray of light came slanting upon two faces lifted out of the shadow.
William Faulkner
#55. She relaxed a bit - well, as much as one could relax while being half-naked and bleeding in front of a vampire. She was the picture of a tasty meal to one such as he.
Kiersten Fay
#56. I have a household of good books, and reading tends to take for me the place of experience - or rather to become itself experience concentrated. You will say this is a dull picture, but I cultivate dulness in a world grown too noisy.
Henry James
#57. They say a picture is worth 1,000 words. I say its closer to 675 or 700.
A.E. Samaan
#58. You have the privilege of presenting a picture of what heaven will be like to those around you.
Elizabeth George
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. Life is like a jigsaw puzzle; Not a "Box of chocolate" You have to put the pieces together to get the 'real' picture.
Andrea L'Artiste
#62. One day my sister Virginia woke up feeling wolfish. She made wolf SOUNDS and did strange things ...
Kyo Maclear
#63. I am just doing photo shoots. It's not something that extraordinary. I'm not a great artist, I'm not writing books, I'm not a painter, and people in the streets ask me for a picture or a note, and I say, 'Why?'
Carine Roitfeld
#64. Your whole life and the story of your journey is the landscape picture on the front of the box of a 1,000 piece puzzle. The pieces are each a small sticky note that ends in mid-sentence. You simply need to figure out where each one starts and ends.
Ashly Lorenzana
#65. I'm a visual person, so it always starts with a picture, and then I get obsessed with the idea, sometimes too much. I have these blank books in which I take notes, and I add postcards and other physical items.
Peter Sis
#66. Oh, sweet little huggles," Mama said. "Remember what Pampy used to say when he wanted to be brave?
Lenora Riegel
#67. 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
#68. Hey, ants!" she shouted. "Please help. Anteater is very hungry, but cannot find any food.
Emlyn Chand
#69. For the rest of the afternoon, Miss Bloom smiled almost as bright as the big yellow sun shining through the front picture window. Her library was filled up with people who loved books.
Augusta Scattergood
#70. People say that a picture is worth a thousand words, but sometimes a mighty quotation is worth more than a thousand pictures.
Jakub Marian
#71. I feel an author and an illustrator weave the magic of a children's picture book together.
Sima Mittal
#73. Outside, across the putrid moat and under the dark mute trees, I would often lie and dream for hours about what I read in the books; and would longingly picture myself amidst gay crowds in the sunny world beyond the endless forests.
H.P. Lovecraft
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. We can _start_ making Christmas and Santa can finish up.
Toni Buzzeo
#78. Kaylee giggled as he tunneled up inside her sleeve.
Out popped his head for a quick look, then he took leave.
He enjoyed scaling up, down and around her shirt.
What a sweet, funny and adorable flirt.
Melinda K. Trotter
#79. I have always believed that poems beg to be read aloud, even if the reader is in a world all her own.
J. Patrick Lewis
#80. 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
#81. Stay positive , smile , and don't let the buggers get you down.
Jon Adkin
#82. I can't picture going to a beach, or anywhere on vacation, without a couple of books as companions.
Rosecrans Baldwin
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. When you write, magic happens. Doors open. People smile and the world is a better place
Alan Dapre
#86. I picture my books as movies when I get stuck, and when I'm working on a new idea, the first thing I do is hit theaters to work out pacing and mood.
Maggie Stiefvater
#87. I have had fans make me the big picture collages of the photo books; I have had fans send me birthday cakes ... sing to me on my voicemail. I have had fans flash me. I have had older fans give me their bras and underwear onstage.
Sean Combs
#88. If our minds are like a garden, then emotions are like the different flowers that bloom and wither in it all year round, according to the season. Emotions sometimes bring dynamism and significant change to our lives, but we must never be led around by them.
Ilchi Lee
#89. You are not too small. No one is ever too small to offer help.
Emlyn Chand
#91. Oh, you mean fairy gossip, Eric," she giggled. "I get the picture," she said fluttering her lacy wings. "Don't look so sad, Eric. There isn't a day that passes when your nosy beak doesn't find its way into someone's business. I'm sure you'll find the best-ever story before
Caz Greenham
#92. People like dialogue. Being a part of it or reading it. Me personally, I'd rather write it.
Andrea L'Artiste
#93. If I was in love with someone, I would get their picture out of the school yearbook and do portraits. If I was curious about sex, I would draw pictures of it. There were no books for me to look at. Then I would go find my father's matches to burn the paper.
Lynn Johnston
#94. Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned
in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages?
Virginia Woolf
#95. The thing about being a screenwriter, scriptwriter, scenarist, You get to have multiple personalities and not be charged.
Andrea L'Artiste
#96. I write books, I write for comic books, I give lectures ... I live. And when the opportunity comes to do a picture, I do a picture.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
#97. I want to make books. I want to take pictures and then write all over the pictures. And then I don't have to say a complete story, because I have the picture, and I have just a word.
Kristen Stewart
#98. Toilet paper unrolled and slithered
then wrapped around my tummy.
That paper tried to roll me up
into an Egyptian mummy.
Melinda K. Trotter
#99. We create our work for children not because they're "cute," but because they're human beings, deserving of respect.
Mo Willems
#100. Cornelius rose. He dried his eyes. For his spirit and will were waterproof.
Phil Bildner
