Dick Bruna Quotes

I always knew I wanted it to be illustrated.

A good picture book should have events that are visually arresting - the pictures should call attention to what is happening in the story.

The text illustrates the pictures - it provides a connective tissue for me. I usually refine the text last, partly because pictures are harder to do, so it's easier to edit words - I use text as grout in between the tiles of the pictures.

A good picture book can almost be whistled. ... All have their own melodies behind the storytelling.

I try to be as clear and simple as I can be in my illustrations so that the child can tell what is going on and what the emotions are.

There's a children's book by Anthony Browne called 'The Tunnel' that I've always loved.

The thing I loved the most about being art director was picking the photographers and working with them.

I have written a few children's books. The first book that I wrote was for children. It was called 'The Package', and it was a mystery story in pictures. It had no words.

My overall artistic goal is to marry graphic design with comic books and traditional storytelling.

I hate it when I'm reading a comic, and the dialogue looks like stickers stuck on top to explain what's going on. For me the best is when your eye goes in a certain point and moves through the composition and then springs out on the dialogue, or gets confused in the image and then goes to the dialogue for an explanation.

Illustrations can be a big window: a looking glass into the author's imagination.

My drawing skills probably froze around when I was 18... Now I'm more interested in the story, how the drawings, the layout can help express the stories and communicate them.

Photography is a small voice, at best, but sometimes one photograph, or a group of them, can lure our sense of awareness.

I've always loved the wild rumpus in 'Where the Wild Things Are' by Maurice Sendak, because the words disappear, the pictures take up the whole page, and we move forward in the story by turning the pages.

I love telling stories with images. But I think there's more to just saying a movie is great visually.

Then one day I thought it would be wonderful to make a whole book, to make my text and my drawings together, and that's how I started doing children's books.

Objects in pictures should so be arranged as by their very position to tell their own story.

Photographs speak to me, and I obey.

What excites me about picture books is the gap between pictures and words. Sometimes the pictures can tell a slightly different story or tell more about the story, about how someone is thinking or feeling.

If it's just brushstrokes wrestling around, it isn't much of a picture book, is it? There still has to be a picture. And maybe it needs to be a picture of a dog named Daisy or a little girl riding a bike. So I have to be careful before I get too carried away in the manner itself.

Whatever I'm thinking about has got to fit into thirty-two pages, the standard picture book size. So that's something. But the structure and the form for me are almost the most important, because these will express as much as words and images will the content of the work.

In terms of graphic versus prose, I could probably do a lecture on that topic. But what stood out most was the difference in pacing the language and resulting scenes. One illustration can do so much for the reader.

In prose, you have a lot more room for digression, for very meaty kinds of dialogues. In graphic novels, you're writing haiku-length dialogue. Your job is to be efficient, to get out of the way of the art.

Like all of my previous work - which I also hope is a bit hard to categorise - 'The Oopsatoreum' is an illustrated book, so a combination of words and pictures that tell a kind of story.

You can't underestimate the importance of cover art.