Michael Foreman Quotes

I have been surrounded by artists and paintings throughout my life. My father Ted Dyer is an artist, and from a very early age I have spent time painting and drawing.

Until I began to learn to draw, I was never much interested in looking at art.

I've been falsely accused of drawing too much from real life. But I am a petty thief - I take little things. And, I mean, I can hardly write 10 words before I start to make things up. I start to invent, because that's what I want to do. I'm running away to an invented place.

When I was a little girl, I loved theater a lot and I was always playing and making my own worlds.

You can't write about stuff you don't know about. You have to live it. You have to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty. Live life to be a good songwriter.

I like characters. I like spirited characters whether they exist in fiction or real life. Whether they're the invention of artistic people or directors, musicians. I think music and art and fashion designers inspire me and I like characters.

I'll continue making films because I love being able to drop into other people's worlds. My goal is to be constantly learning.

When Ellen Datlow was running the fiction at 'Omni' in the late '80s and into the '90s, I had a subscription. It was one of two subscriptions I'd saved for, the other being 'Spider-Man.' And they each opened my mind and my heart in wonderful ways.

I can obviously relate to a character who is an artist, because the creative process is a big part of my life.

In bad weather, I spent hours drawing action figures on paper, coloring them, backing them on cardboard, then cutting them out and creating whole stories around their lives.

I was three years old when I started drawing. I did it all my life.

When I started writing and illustrating, I knew little of classic children's literature. My stories came from real life, from my concerns about what was happening in the world.

Everybody draws when they are little.

I've never turned into a bee - I've never been chased by a mummy or met a ghost. But many of the ideas in my books are suggested by real life.

Hand any four-year-old a fist full of crayons, and it is a very, very few who don't get busy with them, drawing, coloring, scribbling. I have not stopped scribbling.

You have to be creative. It's the basics. You can't be Picasso unless you know how to draw a real face; then you can turn it upside down.

I wasn't in the art world at all as a kid; I was just creative, and we were always doing arts and crafts.

It's so fun to make up stories, but I find that the songs that I'm most proud of came from a real thing in my life - 'Peter Pan' being one of those.

I drew as a child, they tell me. I can vaguely remember doing it. And then I drew again in the late years at high school.

I draw plays every day.

When you're a kid, and someone's an artist, you think of Leonardo da Vinci. You don't think that's a job; you just think of a man with a beard, painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

When I draw, I always recall my mindset when I was a child.

Back before I entered primary school, I liked to draw, even though I was a brat. I especially liked animals and vehicles, and I drew that sort of thing constantly.

Growing up, I had to cobble together a scarecrow of things I loved from various different writers.

Art as a fantasy has been one of my earliest experiences. I suppose a lot of my childhood was a fantasy that involved getting away from things I didn't like. Fortunately it had some relationship to reality so that later I was able to, to some extent, act as I imagined I might.