Philip Reeve Quotes

There is a beauty of seeing a picture and making out what the story behind it might be.

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.

I'm much more interested in allowing a story to happen, and people find whatever meaning is in there.

Maurice Sendak is the daddy of them all when it comes to picture books - the words, the rhythm, the psychology, the design.

I'm of the Samuel Goldwyn school of writing: If you need to send a message, call Western Union. Any messages people take away from my books are the ones they see in them.

A picture book is a small door to the enormous world of the visual arts, and they're often the first art a young person sees.

To me, a story can be both concrete and abstract, or a concrete story can hold abstractions. And abstractions are things that really can't be said so well with words.

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.

I'll be left writing picture books and fairy tales.

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.

I usually don't like to 'spoon feed' my audience, because I grew up idolizing story tellers who tell stories using symbolism, so it was in my nature to do the same.

I see 'Hansel and Gretel' as a breakthrough book for me, and one of the reasons is because I started to apply meaning to the hidden details.

I'm a writer because I love reading. I love the conversation between a reader and a writer, and that it all takes place in a book-sort of a neutral ground. A writer puts down the words, and a reader interprets the words, and every reader will read a book differently. I love that.

'War and Peas' by Michael Foreman, one of the great British children's illustrators. His watercolours are so lovely you could almost eat them, just as members of the target audience have been trying to do for decades.

My name is Jarrett Krosoczka, and I write and illustrate books for children for a living. So I use my imagination as my full-time job.

And that's why any of my picture books exist: They all seem to be built backwards from a simple, emotionally optimistic story beat.

Artists don't make objects. Artists make mythologies.

If anybody reads a story in a magazine or book, different pictures compete in their minds.

Because even very young people are expert readers of pictures, you can convey very complex and subtle messages through pictures that you'd need loads of words to explain. Making a picture book is also a bit like making your own film - and you can make anything you want happen, however impossible!

I try not to be overly literal. When I'm writing songs, I write down a lot of words, and then I try to simplify it. I like to give people hints or words that make visual pictures for them.

The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.

Literature is the question minus the answer.

Writing for children is an art in itself, and a most interesting one.

I've always written. At the age of six or seven, I would get sheets of A4 paper and fold them in half, cut the edges to make a little eight-page booklet, break it up into squares and put in little stick men with little speech bubbles, and I'd have a spy story, a space story and a football story.

I read a lot of books to my children, and they all seem really good. I think people have gotten really good at children's books.