Dave Gibbons Quotes

Generally, my life is absolute chaos, but when I'm writing songs, it's very thought out and regimented.

My struggle over the years has constantly been, it only takes 10 minutes, or an average shower, to come up with a mini-series or two, but it takes a year to draw them. So for me, it's been just trying to find a way to get all these ideas and all these incidents on paper.

For me to be creative, I have to have peace.

You can't really imagine every moment of a movie in the same way that you wouldn't expect a novelist to envision every sentence of his 800-page novel.

When I'm drawing a bottle or a town or a market, I transport myself there. So I start drawing everything that I'm looking at while I'm there. Here's a guy selling the meat, and he will have a hook, and you start adding things, and it's a lot of fun.

I love audio books, and when I paint I'm always listening to a book. I find that my imagination really takes flight in the painting process when I'm listening to audio books.

Indeed, an engineer designing a structure is not unlike an artist painting one. Both start with nothing but talent, experience, and inspiration. The fresh piece of paper on the drawing board is as blank as the newly stretched piece of canvas.

I start a picture and I finish it.

When I got my first loft, I still didn't know what I was going to paint... There were long stretches when I just sat there and thought without interruption.

Imagination is the key to my lyrics. The rest is painted with a little science fiction.

I love being creative. I love acting, but I also love directing because you get to have a vision for the whole and bring that vision to fruition.

'The Indian Runner' was easy. It had been incubating in me for eight years, and by the time I sat down to write the thing, I had all the pictures in my head.

All stories come from the subconscious - which is why it doesn't make sense to over-plan.

I go to the studio every day, but I don't paint every day. I love playing with my architectural models. I love making plans. I could spend my life arranging things.

I carry a notebook full of sketches of pictures I want to take - they are really scruffy sketches, but at least I am going out there with a clear objective.

I try to stay focused on my creativity.

For me, I get a part of an idea here and a little bit of an idea there, and then finally it accumulates into a movie.

Conception, my boy, fundamental brain work, is what makes all the difference in art.

I come in. I'm going to sketch, I'm going to drape, I don't know what I'm going to do.

Cartoonists' dirty secret is that we tend to come up with stories that involve things that are really fun to draw.

I love producing! It's so much fun to start with a blank canvas and create the picture you want to create and see it all come together.

To some extent, I draw on what I see around me; in other places, I imagine what I write.

I mean, I don't know anything else that I would try to do, but it's a very frustrating thing to do, because you are trying to take what's a fantasy in your head and make it live through the minds of 200 people.

I try not to picture a reader when I'm writing. It's like trying to make a great table but not picturing anybody sitting at it.

To this day I over prepare. I draw storyboards for every scene - chicken scratches so crude that they amuse and horrify the crew. I send out shot lists, act out the scenes, and search for a theme that I can relate to. It's my favorite time of the process.