Illustrator Quotes

Writers were a strange sort; I knew that much from the newspapers.

Chris Priestley

I plucked a honeysuckle where The hedge on high is quick with thorn, And climbing for the prize, was torn, And fouled my feet in quag-water; And by the thorns and by the wind The blossom that I took was thinn'd, And yet I found it sweet and fair.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

On Saturday, he ate through one piece of chocolate cake, one ice-cream cone, one pickle, one slice of Swiss cheese, one slice of salami, one lollipop, one piece of cherry pie, one sausage, one cupcake, and one slice of watermelon. That night he had a stomach ache.

I've realized over the years that, with rare exceptions, most writer's block isn't writer's block at all: It's necessary time that allows the unconscious mind to do its deep work. The great Ah-Ha! moments don't usually come at the keyboard. They come when I'm lying on the floor, staring into space (or banging my head against the wall in frustration). All of a sudden the Unconscious Camera turns on, a movie starts playing in my head-and there it is: The Big Moment. Or the Whole Damn Story. And, in many ways, I had nothing whatsoever to do with it.

J. M. DeMatteis

Everything that I have told you is, of course, a fairy tale. Life is magical, after all. Nothing is safe and everything changes.

Trina Schart Hyman

Frog said, 'I wrote 'Dear Toad, I am glad that you are my best friend. Your best friend, Frog.' 'Oh,' said Toad, 'that makes a very good letter.'Then Frog and Toad went out onto the front porch to wait for the mail. They sat there, feeling happy together.

Drawing is giving yourself up to an exercise with no immediate application. It is a form of communion with your subject, be it in front of you or in your head. Expertise and skill go hand in hand with your desire to express feelings, to tell stories, to create and share worlds. It's personal.

John Howe (illustrator)

Everyone must imagine his own snakes because no one else's snakes can ever be as awful.

I couldn't do them if I didn't know horses lived behind them.

Charles Keeping

I am in a very unsettled condition, as the oyster said when they poured melted butter all over his back.

The artist's main business is to train his eye to see, then to probe and then to train his hand to work in sympathy with his eye. I have a habit of looking, and really seeing.

There is an implied warranty that a commissioned work should last a lifetime. There is to be no charge.

Maxfield Parrish

For I am coconut / and the heart of me / is sweeter / than you know.

Life is not simple, and therefore history, which is past life, is not simple.

In the present age, alas! our pens are ravished by unlettered authors and unmannered critics, that make a havoc rather than a building, a wilderness rather than a garden. But, a lack! what boots it to drop tears upon the preterit?

Aubrey Beardsley

The blackbirds are in this book, they're both pro the kids and against the kids. Just like fate. Sometimes it goes your way. Sometimes... and also a blackbird is from my passion for Schubert songs and his blackbirds and his birds of doom or birds of good. … some people were baffled that in the last big picture of that book, there's a crucifix on the wall of the children's house. Everybody assumes the hero and heroine are Jewish and the mother is Jewish. They're not. They're not. — That was my point. Those kids were in the wrong place at the wrong time. And all children were in the Holocaust. Everybody was in the Holocaust. So, I made sure my hero and heroine were not Jewish children. That was too easy. That was too easy.

Coleridge received the Person from Porlock
And ever after called him a curse,
Then why did he hurry to let him in?
He could have hid in the house.

A wasp in a wig is altogether beyond the appliances of art.

If not for the long tail, one might mistake a theropod for a big, toothy, marauding bird in the dark. That theropods are birdlike is logical, since birds are their closest living relatives. Remember that next time you eat a drumstick or scramble some eggs.

Gregory Scott Paul

Child-ren, behold the Chim-pan-zee; He sits on the an-ces-tral tree From which we sprang in ag-es gone. I'm glad we sprang: had we held on, We might, for aught that I can say, Be horrid Chim-pan-zees to-day.

There is no line between fine art and illustration; there is no high or low art; there is only art, and it comes in many forms.

His mother saw that he was not lonesome, and because she was an understanding mother, even though she was a cow, she let him just sit there and be happy.

The thing to be wished for, is not that the mountains should become easier, but that men should become wiser and stronger.

I find a particular delight in taking the caricature as far as I can. It satisfies me to stretch the human frame about and recreate it and yet keep a likeness.

I believe that most of us would like to be thought well of by horses.