April Gornik Quotes

I never really got nightmares from movies. In fact, I recall my father saying when I was three years old that I would be scared, but I never was.

I was influenced by surrealist poetry and painting as were thousands of other people, and it seems to me to have become a part of the way I write, but it's not.

There's a monster outside my room, can I have a glass of water?

I've dreamed landscapes for years, and my dreams play an enormous role in my work. In fact, when I first started doing landscapes I felt insecure about painting in this style, and the dreams were like positive omens for me, and I've done a few paintings that were exact replicas of images that came to me in dreams.

Surrealism had a great effect on me because then I realised that the imagery in my mind wasn't insanity. Surrealism to me is reality.

I dream a lot. I do more painting when I'm not painting. It's in the subconscious.

I've always had a certain fascination. It's basically paint what you know, and this is what I grew up with.

To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul.

To me, writing and composing are much more like painting, about colors and brushes; I don't use a computer when I write, and I don't use a piano. I'm at a desk writing, and it's very broad strokes and notes as colors on a palette.

I am always locked in my design studio.

Painters hate having to explain what their work is about. They always say, 'It's whatever you want it to be' - because I think that's their intention, to connect with each person's subconscious, and not to try and dictate.

With my pictures, what I hope is that it encourages the reader to imagine more pictures of his own.

I have to take it as a given that I have got a certain ability to do something. I can be an artist, which is take something and transform it into another thing. I can just see something, and I can see my painting.

My art originates from hallucinations only I can see. I translate the hallucinations and obsessional images that plague me into sculptures and paintings.

Sometimes I write what I can't paint, and I paint what I can't write. I use a different part of the brain.

I have a friend who calls me the queen of the nightmares because I've always had really bad nightmares. I keep a notebook by the side of my bed, so I'll wake up in the night from a bad dream, and my heart's pounding, and I'm really scared, but I write it down, and sometimes I get ideas for books that way.

I've been painting and drawing fish since I was very young. My mom found old pictures I did when I was around 6 or 7 of all these sharks and scuba diver looking back, a big ship, throwing a harpoon. There was already a message within what I saw.

I like films that probe emotional questions and inspire you to get creative and get writing, get draping, painting, cooking, whatever that thing is where you have that kind of output.

I think that most of the monsters I dream of, I dreamt of as a child.

I guess standup is really painting pictures with words - especially for me, as I describe quite fantastical, visual things. My art teacher, Dexter Dalwood, always seemed to think they were linked. We bonded over our love of Vic Reeves.

Usually I start with a concept, which I then sketch out so that I can get a feel for the character. The character doesn't really become real to me until I draw them.

My dreams are like fuzzy Charlie Kaufman movies, so I love going to sleep.

I spent a lot of time drawing and writing little comic books, and my mom was a rapper, so I would steal her instrumentals.

In the same way I accumulate objects, I also accumulate images, and I find them arranging themselves into categories, too. And some images insist on being painted; others don't.

I saw 'Beauty and the Beast' at eight years old in theatres and spent hours trying to recreate the majestic imagery of that story in a drawing notepad at home.