John Gould Quotes

The illustrators work so much harder on the books than the writers do. I mean, that's so much work doing what they do, and it's terrible for them.

Most people don't realize the many steps that a pop-up goes through. There are a variety of "Dummies" (the sketch phase of the book). Then finally the pencil "dummy", then the finished art which is like painting pieces of a jig saw puzzle.

All the sculptures of today, like those of the past, will end one day in pieces... So it is important to fashion ones work carefully in its smallest recess and charge every particle of matter with life.

I do everything. Of course, I have 50 people who work for me to do the drudgery of mold making and all the foundry. This is an enormous task. But every stroke in these sculptures is from my hands.

The most labor-intensive part of putting together a comic is the drawing.

I'd rather create a miniature painting than a Taj Mahal of a book.

The artist is seen like a producer of commodities, like a factory that turns our refrigerators.

Paintings don't just happen. I am not a proponent of the idea of an artist as someone who kind of magically makes things and has no real control or isn't willfully producing a certain kind of thing. It is labor-intensive, and it is research-intensive. You are making one decision after another, trying to get at something you think is important.

For the essential thing about the work of art is that it is work, and very hard work too.

Writing a book is like torture that you don't know, but after it's done and there it is. It's a joy like unlike anything else, I think it's the closest that a man can come to knowing what is feels like to have a baby.

I don't think I'm essentially interested in children's books. I'm interested in writing, and in pictures. I'm interested in people and in children because they are people.

I love picture books. I think some of the best people in children's books are the ones who create their own picture books. I wish I could say I'm one of them, but I'm not.

I remember that I stood on the library steps holding my books and looking for a minute at the soft hinted green in the branches against the sky and wishing, as I always did, that I could walk home across the sky instead of through the village.

It is a curious fact that with 'Through the Looking-Glass' the faculty of making book illustrations departed from me... I have done nothing in that direction since.

When I illustrate a cover or a book, I draw upon what the author tells me; that's how I see my responsibility as an illustrator. J.K. Rowling is very descriptive in her writing — she gives an illustrator a lot to work with. Each story is packed full of rich visual descriptions of the atmosphere, the mood, the setting, and all the different creatures and people. She makes it easy for me. The images just develop as I sketch and retrace until it feels right and matches her vision.

Could Henry Ford produce the Book of Kells? Certainly not. He would quarrel initially with the advisability of such a project and then prove it was impossible.

One was a book thief. The other stole the sky.

I like that feeling when you’re making art, that you’re taking the energy out of your body and putting it into a physical object. I like things that are labor-intensive : you make a little thing and another little thing and another little thing, and eventually you see a possibility.

To create a work of art, great or small, is work, hard work, and work requires discipline and order.

The books take a year just to do the drawing. I will travel to a country to do the research and get ideas. Sometimes I don't travel to do research, but mostly I do. It takes a long time, but do I ever get tired of it? Not really. The characters kind of grow and evolve.

Do not, do not, do not books for ever hammer at people like perpetual bells? When, between two books, silent sky appears: be glad

Cartooning is an artistic commitment that requires the full attention and passion of the artist on every level; one should not get into it if one expects to do anything more than produce a book or a story that is exactly as one wants it to be.

When I'm writing a comic book, I'm thinking about a character that I'm going to be drawing on the page. I've never drawn a character to look like who I want to cast in a movie because I don't think that way. I'm a real monomaniac. I do one thing at a time.

I never spent less than two years on the text of one of my picture books, even though each of them is approximately 380 words long. Only when the text is finished ... do I begin the pictures.

When rivers flooded, when fire fell from the sky, what a fine place the library was, the many rooms, the books. With luck, no one found you. How could they!--when you were off to Tanganyika in '98, Cairo in 1812, Florence in 1492!?