Shaun Tan Quotes

I've been trying to make this argument that digital comics and print comics are both art, but there are subtle differences.

I don't need to write comics for a living. I have movies and TV for that. I write comics for one reason and one reason only: I love comics. I love the form, the structure, the storytelling process, I love everything about it.

The technology keeps moving forward, which makes it easier for the artists to tell their stories and paint the pictures they want.

There are art forms we don't know about yet that will be enabled by technology we haven't invented yet.

Of late years (perhaps as a result of our political changes) art has borrowed from history more than ever.

My movement from painting to film was a very conscious one.

I think comics have far more potential than a lot of people realize.

Superheroes are best imagined in comic books. The union between the written word, the image, and then what your imagination has to do to connect those allows for so much.

I fight for the debunking of the artist and an end to individual pictures.

When I was making my debut as an artist, I felt that it was very important that I try to combine the background of my own culture, my people, and the country into the contemporary art world. So that's how I came up with the term 'superflat.'

I read comics because of the art.

There's tons of people doing awesome things with comics online - I'm just one dude!

I got into architecture via fine arts, and I was a sculptor myself, and I have always involved artists in my projects. When I say 'involved,' I mean I always bring artists in at the beginning projects before they're built and say, 'Will you do a room? Will you do a sculpture floating in mid-air? Will you make a chimney? Will you do something?'

People underestimate the complexity of comic books.

I've always been an enormous fan of comic books and anything that captures the real in a surreal environment.

Modernism was born in part out of the need to find fresh ways of expression, to describe a new world that was unlike anything that had gone before.

I want to make work that reflects different times and processes.

The most impactful comics that I've read are the ones where the artists swung for the bleachers and tried to immerse you in their world.

I love writing novels, but there is something deeply invigorating about the comic-book medium.

I feel like I understood the language of comics. I had a real fluidity with that medium at a very early age.

When you write comic books and when you are writing for television, you're not writing the end product, you are writing notes for someone else to make the end product essentially. My scripts are just directions for the artist to draw pages and the pages are what is seen. I kind of feel like it's a safety net, you're able to hide behind the art to a certain extent, and in television you're able to hide behind the actors and the production, but with novels, your words are it

Not only is the motion picture an art, but it is the one entirely new art that has been evolved on this planet for hundreds of years. It is the only art at which we of this generation have any possible chance to greatly excel.

Film is such a powerful medium. It can really affect change; you can affect so many different people in different ways.

Comics seldom move me the way I would be moved by a novel or movie. I say this as someone who would rather read comics than watch movies, listen to music, anything. But it's not an operatic medium. I hear other people talk about being moved to tears by comics. I can't imagine that.

Anton brings the camera. I'll bring a tuba, wear black, not shave, and take us to a burned-down Chinese restaurant. (On being photographed by his longtime photo collaborator Anton Corbijn)