Justin Cartwright Quotes

It's part of our pop culture to give animals human personalities and talents.

Popular culture bombards us with examples of animals being humanized for all sorts of purposes, ranging from education to entertainment to satire to propaganda. Walt Disney, for example, made us forget that Mickey is a mouse, and Donald a duck. George Orwell laid a cover of human societal ills over a population of livestock.

Every literary culture has among its first bearings the 'blether' of animals who seek to make sense of human existence.

When I write about animals, I use anthropological techniques and the language you would use for a person. You don't have to anthropomorphize animals, just acknowledge their individuality.

When we have relationships with animals, we often make up who they are.

Animals are good to think with.

I love using my imagination. I love writing about animals.

Anthropomorphism is such an interesting concept. It means projecting human thoughts and emotions onto an animal. Which implies that thoughts and feelings belong to humans alone. Of course, if you believe in evolution, or if you believe in the Bible, that's not so. Both evolution and the Bible tell us that we're part of a family.

If cattle and horses, or lions, had hands, or were able to draw with their feet and produce the works which men do, horses would draw the forms of gods like horses, and cattle like cattle, and they would make the gods' bodies the same shape as their own.

I read 'Animal Farm' when I was 11, and it remained my favorite book, really.

When I'd written my 'Silverwing' series - I'd imbued the bats with full human awareness and vocabulary.

The fact that the apes exist and that we can study them is extremely important and makes us reflect on ourselves and our human nature. In that sense alone, you need to protect the apes.

I've had encounters with animals that have been really mystical. I've always been really into animals. But the way they appear in the paintings, they come from my mind's eye more than: 'I'm gonna draw a dog now.' It isn't thought out: 'Now I'm gonna draw a bird.' They just appear.

I probably shouldn't say this about all animals, but at least the farm animals that I've hung out with, and even when I go to the zoo usually, they're like a blank slate. I guess that's why I like them. They're puppets, and you can imagine them being anything you want.

Anthropomorphic animals, when taken out of narrative into actual visibility, always turn into buffoonery or nightmare.

Reading was such a formative part of my childhood (along with 'Loony Tunes'), that it is difficult to pin point the most influential book. But, under an interrogation light I would probably have to say 'Jane Eyre' by Charlotte Bronte.

Kids are more drawn to animal characters than human.

In Britain, the great hidden secret of talking animals and children's literature is how political it was in its bones, beneath the obvious cuteness.

People idealise their animals, and at the same time they patronisingly overlook a dog's natural life - biting fleas, burying bones, rolling in garbage, barking up an empty tree all night... But what do they do themselves? Bury stuff that will rot in secret and then dig it up and bury it again and rant and rave under empty trees!

I like using animals because they help suspend my reader's disbelief. We have certain ideas about dentists. We don't have many ideas about rhinoceros dentists.

Humans have always used animals to depict ideas about themselves: ideas about their status, about their position in life and society and the world.

But if cattle and horses or lions had hands, or were able to draw with their hands and do the work that men can do, horses would draw the forms of the gods like horses, and cattle like cattle, and they would make their bodies such as they each had themselves.

… mortals suppose that the gods are born (as they themselves are), and that they wear man's clothing and have human voice and body. But if cattle or lions had hands, so as to paint with their hands and produce works of art as men do, they would paint their gods and give them bodies in form like their own—horses like horses, cattle like cattle.

I grew up actually reading 'The Hobbit,' not 'The Lord of the Rings.' I loved 'The Hobbit' growing up.

We're so much more likely to feel sympathy for an animal than another person; thus, the best fiction uses animals to define truly humane behavior.