Shaun Tan Quotes

My idea of artistry has always been 'try everything until you find out what works.'

Jeph Loeb has been great to work with, and he's been really supportive of some really bizarre ideas I've had.

I always say, and I truly believe this, that my work is three steps ahead of me. I have an idea for something and I tend to feel like it's leading me and I'll follow the process through, and it's not until after I've seen it that I truly understand why I'm doing this.

Brian Eno developed systems to keep himself on edge and to keep himself in a position where he's generating ideas.

I'm dependent on writing for a living, so really it's to my advantage to understand how the creative process works. One of the problems is, when you start to do that, in effect you're going to have to step off the edge of science and rationality.

But one of the things I learned from improvising is that all of life is an improvisation, whether you like it or not. Some of the greatest scientific discoveries of the 20th century came out of people dropping things.

Anyone who does anything creative is always gonna want to change.

Musical accidents are a gold mine. The thing about accidental discoveries is they won't be made unless you put yourself in a position to make that discovery. To do that means hundreds of hours, days and weeks where you do things and don't discover anything.

If the playwright knew every little thing about his play, why bother? There must be discovery all the time, otherwise why bother to do it?

In the history of comics and movies and music too, it's always when things are at their bottomed-out, either creatively or financially, there's more chance-taking going on.

I want to try it to see what it's like and see what my stuff looks like when I take it from inception to completion.

I've written with people who aren't like me, then I've written with people who totally get it. It's like a blind date, and you never know what's going to happen. But it's really cool because they learn from you, and you learn a little bit from them. And sometimes it works out, and sometimes it doesn't.

I really believe that cultivating creativity, as a general principle, is about managing your energy.

As you continue to work on a show, if I still feel inspired, and I feel they are making exciting choices, then our enthusiasm remains. This is not a perfect science. It's an evolutionary process.

Part of being the successful Pixar is that we will take risks on teams and ideas, and some of them won't work out. We only lose from this if we don't respond to the failures. If we respond, and we think it through and figure out how to move ahead, then we're learning from it. That's what Pixar is.

Some of my best songwriting choices started as mistakes or learning curves, when I accidentally hit a 'wrong' key or something. I try not to lose that the more I learn the how's and why's of piano.

Half of art is accident, but there is no accident without free experiment.

Perhaps creativity is fumbling that dance step, or driving the chisel the wrong way into the stone.

You're not always going to hit the bull's-eye. I'm going to make movies that work and I'm going to make movies that don't work, and that's just a part of being creative. Because really, I think if you're taking risks and you're pushing yourself and you're doing things that scare you, you are going to fall on your face, and it's not always going to work.

I don't think you can be taught how to make art. You can be coached, but on a fundamental level you have to figure it out for yourself. You have to learn how your own mind works, figure out your own relationship to the art; you essentially have to invent it completely for yourself.

It's so much in me to want to keep experimenting all the time. It's just inherent. Therefore I keep reaching for instruments I don't particularly know how to play, and then I become excited.

I've never really seen too much difference between writing or making visual art or designing furniture or clothing. It's still my brain - I'm just using different parts of it for different things.

There's no way to really mock up or simulate what I'm doing until I'm there. An exhibition for me is not a statement but an experiment.

I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.

I have a theory that the only original things we ever do are mistakes.