Shaun Tan Quotes

Any working composer or painter or sculptor will tell you that inspiration comes at the eighth hour of labour rather than as a bolt out of the blue. We have to get our vanities and our preconceptions out of the way and do the work in the time allotted.

Art is a magic which makes the hours melt away and even days dissolve into seconds

The artistic impulse seems not to wish to produce finished work. It certainly deserts us half-way, after the idea is born; and if we go on, it is labor.

To me, it's like the difference between a pen and a paintbrush. Music draws from almost the identical place as art does, which really is that intangible - it's like you're pulling from the ether. I don't know where it comes from. Nobody really does. It sort of arrives when it wants to.

It was like there was a pile of kindling that was in the back of my imagination just waiting there. Once I lit it, it just flared up and I kept getting ideas and ideas.

A lot of painters listen to music, I think, while they paint. But I hate to do that. It's a horror. I can't really listen to the music. I'm not really concentrating on it, and I'm not really concentrating on the painting.

Artwork is not like a commercial business; there is no such thing as a schedule for art. You can't hurry art.

Everybody knows that I don't have a muse. I'm not interested in that.

Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.

My ideas come when I least expect it, so I've always got to have a studio nearby or close by somewhere.

Trying to force creativity is never good.

I go into my workroom seven mornings a week. There will only be one or two mornings a week where it seems to be going well, but to earn those days you have to go through slow, slodgy days where your mind feels like porridge.

Like all artists, I go through creative spurts.

Any art worth its name requires you to be fundamentally lost for a very long time.

In my experience a painting is not made with colors and paint at all. I don't know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint?

Sometimes ideas are coming so fast that I have to stop doing one song to get another. But I don't forget the first one. If it works, it will always be there. It's like the truth: it will find you and lift you up. And if it ain't right, it will dissolve like sand on the beach.

The mythology is that from chaos comes great work. I actually used to think that when I was younger, and I no longer think that anymore.

That's the worst and best thing about being in the studio, feeling completely lost and not knowing how to put the final touch on something. But once you find it, there's nothing like that feeling.

I get writer's block all the time. The only way I can write what I consider to be good lyrics is to put myself through the mill.

I don't know where the ideas come from, and it's terrifying. They seem to be absolute flukes. When I was in my 20s, I'd walk around with a notebook all the time and make sure I wrote down anything that occurred to me. Now I'm just hoping that some sort of event will descend on me.

I get a lot of my songwriting done while driving around Nashville - sometimes it comes to me that way.

My inspiration comes from everything, everywhere. Just the people around you, the things you see and most definitely your experiences. Once I get an idea, it pretty much writes itself.

Not all ideas are like a twinkling star in the sky, and you get inspired to make a record the next day.

I sometimes begin a drawing with no preconceived problem to solve, with only the desire to use pencil on paper... but as my eye takes in what is so produced, a point arrives where some idea crystallizes, and then a control and ordering begins to take place.

It's seldom you make a great picture. you have to milk the cow quite a lot to get plenty of milk to make a little cheese.