Flying Lotus Quotes

My dad and I used to shoot little one-stop animations on an old 8mm film camera when I was no more than 7 or 8, and when he was away at work, I would keep shooting nonsensical, short animated films using 'Star Wars' figures or Smurfs - depended what the narrative was.

I used to send away for eight-minute Super 8 movies of various Ray Harryhausen scenes advertised on the back of 'Famous Monsters of Filmland' magazine.

My earliest memories are making little Super 8 films - or watching my brother make stop-motion space spectaculars.

I was totally all about the American Girl dolls when I was little - I had so many.

I was making a lot of 8mm home movies, since I was twelve, making little dramas and comedies with the neighborhood kids.

Growing up, my mom made us this amazing thing called The Mack Theatrical Wardrobe. It was a massive trunk filled with everything that you'd want as a kid if you were into imagination and play.

Pretend was a big part of my childhood.

I loved to watch cartoons and even made little stop-motion films in the backyard. At the time, I never really thought that it was something you could do for a living; it never actually hit me that people do that sort of thing or I would be capable of it.

I still have a lot of military contacts, and friends and readers who've served or are serving, and they react really strongly to G.I. Joe. I've lost count of the number who've said, 'Oh, I just loved it as a kid. I had all the figures; it really made me think.'

I was a part of that Beanie Babies generation. I had, like, 400 of them... OK, maybe not that many, but I had a lot of little stuffed animals that I liked to make talk. I was a big dork, and I still am.

I do hear from people at my exhibition about seeing these things made from this toy from their childhood, and it brings them back. They'll go and buy a set of Lego from the gift shop because of that nostalgia and seeing it at the art exhibition.

I loved make-believe. I was the child in the cupboard playing with my Barbies.

I had a huge interior world as a kid: I'd sit on endless wet holidays in Cornwall playing with paper dolls.

My favorite thing to do as a kid was pretend I was in the opening credits of a sitcom. As the theme song would play, I'd look up at the imaginary camera and smile as my name would flash on the screen.

I used to wrestle with my stuffed animals.

In these days of high-tech video games, it's remarkable that kids once got incredibly thrilled while pushing little metal racing cars around a cardboard track: The toy car was yours, and you invested it with importance and enhanced it with fantasy and pitied it because it was small, like you were. Such games were weapons against the ennui of endless Saturdays.

I remember kids used to give me a penny for drawing them a horse. I loved horses, but I couldn't have one, so I would draw a horse for myself. I would make it food and a blanket for it to wear and a place to live.

There's this idea that there was a point in our childhood when we were in some way better than we are now and we should try to hang on to that.

When I was six all I could think about was ding-dongs and yo-yos.

When you're a kid, if you watch 'The Jeffersons' with your family at seven o'clock, it seems like a natural phenomenon, like the sun setting. The universe is a strange, strange place when all of a sudden you can't use your glass with the Bionic Woman on it any more.

As a child I did a lot of imaginary bits, you know. It depends on the individual, I enjoyed then knocking the nail in, I enjoy knocking nails in walls to hang pictures up, but I also enjoy thinking 'I'm gonna do that' but I actually won't do it, I enjoy imagining doing things just as much.

If I have an unusual gift, it's not that I draw particularly better than other people - I've never fooled myself about that. Rather it's that I remember things other people don't recall: the sounds and feelings and images - the emotional quality - of particular moments in childhood. Happily an essential part of myself - my dreaming life - still lives in the light of childhood.

In childhood we all have ... a far higher sensibility for April and April evenings - a heartache for them, which in riper years is gradually and irretrievably consoled.

Childhood feels so permanent, like it's the entire world, and then one day it's over and you're shoveling wet dirt onto your father's coffin, stunned at the impermanence of everything.

Everything when I was a kid was illustrated.