Words matter. These are the best Shaun Tan Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Drawing a good picture is like telling a really good lie – the key is in the incidental detail.
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.
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.
I think ‘The Road’ is a good example of a book everyone should read, but I wouldn’t recommend it to young kids.
I get very creative when I’m trapped in a plane and I can’t do anything else.
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.
Whenever I start a project, I have a broad range of possibilities.
Illustrating is more about communicating specific ideas to a reader. Painting is more like pure science, more about the act of painting.
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.
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.
Sometimes I write captions on the in-flight magazines and then replace them in the seat pocket.
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.
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.
Good and bad ideas both come from the same fountain of speculation and experiment.
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.
For myself, I’ve kind of always been interested in pets because they’re not human.
It was better to be known as the kid who could draw than as the short kid.
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.