Shaun Tan Quotes & Sayings

As a younger person, I was obsessed with Ray Bradbury, and I think his stories did more to shape me as a storyteller than anybody else - even though, when I read them now, a lot of them seem overly sentimental. But that's probably the writer that I've thought about the most, even though I don't necessarily like a lot of his work. — Shaun Tan

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Shaun Tan

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

It's funny how these days, when every household has its own inter-continental ballistic missile, you hardly even think about them ... A lot of us, though, have started painting the missiles different colors, even decorating them with our own designs, like butterflies or stenciled flowers. They take up so much space in the backyard, they might as well look nice, and the government leaflets don't say that you have to use the paint they supply. — Shaun Tan

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

The Federal Department of Odds and Ends: sweepus underum carpetae. — Shaun Tan

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

I get very creative when I'm trapped in a plane and I can't do anything else. — Shaun Tan

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

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

Sometimes I write captions on the in-flight magazines and then replace them in the seat pocket. — Shaun Tan

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

terrible fates are inevitable — Shaun Tan

Staring at a blank piece of paper, I can't think of anything original. I feel utterly uninspired and unreceptive. It's the familiar malaise of 'artist's block' and in such circumstances there is only one thing to do: just start drawing.

The artist Paul Klee refers to this simple act as 'taking a line for a walk', an apt description of my own basic practice: allowing the tip of a pencil to wander through the landscape of a sketchbook, motivated by a vague impulse but hoping to find something much more interesting along the way. Strokes, hooks, squiggles and loops can resolve into hills, faces, animals, machines -even abstract feelings- the meanings of which are often secondary to the simple act of making (something young children know intuitively). Images are not preconceived and then drawn, they are conceived as they are drawn. Indeed, drawing is its own form of thinking, in the same way birdsong is 'thought about' within a bird's throat. — Shaun Tan

It was better to be known as the kid who could draw than as the short kid. — Shaun Tan

Today is the tomorrow you were promised yesterday. — Shaun Tan

I'm often wary of using the word 'inspiration' to introduce my work
it sounds too much like a sun shower from the heavens, absorbed by a passive individual enjoying an especially receptive moment. While that may be the case on rare occasions, the reality is usually far more prosaic. Staring at a blank piece of paper, I can't think of anything original. I feel utterly uninspired and unreceptive. It's the familiar malaise of 'artist's block' and in such circumstances there is only one thing to do: just start drawing. — Shaun Tan

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

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

Yes, we all know that there's a good chance the missiles won't work properly when the government people finally come to get them, but over the years we've stopped worrying about that. Deep down, most of us feel it's probably better this way. After all, if there are families in faraway countries with their own backyard missiles, armed and pointed back at us, we would hope that they too have found a much better use for them. — Shaun Tan

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

Drawing a good picture is like telling a really good lie - the key is in the incidental detail. — Shaun Tan

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

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

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

Whenever I start a project, I have a broad range of possibilities. — Shaun Tan

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

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. — Shaun Tan

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

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

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

without sense or reason — Shaun Tan

I became more interested in the idea of being an immigrant and particularly of being in a country you're not familiar with. And so I began reading migrants' stories. The fact that my father is Chinese - he emigrated from Malaysia when he was about 20 - may have had some bearing on my attraction to the subject. — Shaun Tan

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

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. — Shaun Tan

Sometimes the day begins with nothing to look forward to ... — Shaun Tan

The green painted concrete out in front of the house, which at first seemed like a novel way to save money on lawn-moving, was now just plain depressing. The hot water came reluctantly to the kitchen sink as if from miles away, and even then without conviction, and sometimes a pale brownish color. Many of the windows wouldn't open properly to let flies out. Others wouldn't shut properly to stop them getting in. The newly planted fruit trees died in the sandy soil of a too-bright backyard and were left like grave-markers under the slack laundry lines, a small cemetery of disappointment. It appeared to be impossible to find the right kinds of food, or learn the right way to say even simple things. The children said very little that wasn't a complaint. — Shaun Tan

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

For myself, I've kind of always been interested in pets because they're not human. — Shaun Tan

Good and bad ideas both come from the same fountain of speculation and experiment. — Shaun Tan