Top 33 Illustrator Quotes

You don’t put your head above the parapet and become a personality if you’re an illustrator – it’s not part of it; it’s not possible. You are a servant to the story.

I’m not a painter by any stretch of the imagination; I’m a dyed-in-the-wool traditional illustrator, and I begin with black and white. If I need colour, I add it over the top. There’s a calligraphic element to it… it’s about the texture of lines on the page.

I’m an illustrator. I have to accept my role.

I’ve just written a very gritty, non-magical take on the King Arthur legend, ‘Here Lies Arthur,’ and I’m currently toying with some other historical ideas, as well as working with the illustrator David Wyatt on some sequels to my Victorian space opera ‘Larklight.’

I wound up studying art and design, got a job at Lonely Planet Publications as a designer, cartographer and illustrator.

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.

It’s not really an easier racket than acting is. For some reason, I guess it had – the rejection of an illustrator’s life is less penetrating than the rejection of an actor’s life. So I was able to manage that. But all the while, I still nursed that old dream of being an actor.

I don’t think there’s an illustrator who’s as good as a Titian or a Rembrandt… but then, Rembrandt was a bit of an illustrator on the quiet, you know?

I love Maira Kalman. She’s an amazing illustrator and writer. I’ve loved her since I was in college, but when I moved to New York and experienced the same city she was drawing and writing about, I developed a whole new appreciation. Her work made me observe everything so much deeper and more joyfully.

I wanted to become an illustrator as a child.

I grew up wanting only to be an illustrator. I studied art at Laurel School in Cleveland and at Smith College.

The writing process isn’t something I’m in love with. I’m an illustrator who writes.

I was a magazine illustrator for many years before I became an actor, and I used to think, ‘Oh, God, all those wasted years!’ But now I think it’s just been one big enterprise of illustrating. I used to do it with colored pencils, and now I do it with this voice and this set of limbs.

I’m sometimes a cartoonist, and there’s an audience for that, and I’m sometimes an illustrator, and there’s an audience for that.

I’m sure it came as no surprise to my friends and family when I became an illustrator and then a writer because, from about the age of five, I was one of those children who always had his nose in a book.

I love being an illustrator because I get to read really great stories, work with amazing people, travel and see places I never would’ve seen. And I get to draw all the time.

My husband wrote the story for my first book, but then he didn’t want to do that anymore. So if I was going to go on being an illustrator, I had to start writing the stories, too.

My mom was a biological illustrator for a time before computers replaced that job.

I write plays and movies, I live and work at the borderline between word and image just as any cartoonist or illustrator does. I’m not a pure writer. I use words as the score for kinetic imagistic representations.

Dad was an amazing storyteller and illustrator, which he did in his spare time – very inspiring and dramatic.

I don’t think of myself as an illustrator. I think of myself as a cartoonist. I write the story with pictures – I don’t illustrate the story with the pictures.

Some people have been kind enough to call me a fine artist. I’ve always called myself an illustrator. I’m not sure what the difference is. All I know is that whatever type of work I do, I try to give it my very best. Art has been my life.

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.

I had started out my grown-up life in New York City, but I couldn’t figure out how to be an actor there. And so I had been a magazine illustrator instead.

As the years went by I became a writer and illustrator, although exclusively of fantasies.

I wanted to become a cartoon artist, a portrait artist, and an illustrator. This was my first idea.

Information and inspiration are everywhere… history, art, architecture, everything an illustrator needs. Europe is, after all, the land that has generated most of the enduring myths and legends of Western culture.

I get asked a lot if I’d want to get into live-action movies, and the answer, honestly, is ‘no.’ I’m an illustrator, and I think animation is an extension of that way of expressing myself. That’s not to say I’d never make a live-action movie, but I don’t strive for it.

My real background was in art studies. At the beginning I was a painter, then I was this graphic designer, then I became an illustrator, then I was a comic artist. But for me it’s a different way of expression, a different field of art. They’re not separated; everything for me is related.

I never wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a book illustrator. I used to hurry home from school and draw.

Balancing an illustrator and author can be tricky, but I was an illustrator mostly before I wrote my books.

As an illustrator you need to understand the human body – but having looked at and understood nature, you must develop an ability to look away and capture the balance between what you’ve seen and what you imagine.

The reason I love comics and have collected them for 37 years is because I always wanted to be an illustrator and a writer – and comics are really the perfect blend of those two mediums.