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Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Anthony Browne Quotes

I had just been promoted to the first rugby team. It was a perfect, wonderful coming of age. My brother was already in the team, and my father had come to watch us. We went home, and my father died in front of me. Horribly, in about half an hour. He had a heart attack.

– Anthony Browne

The illustrations in picture books are the first paintings most children see, and because of that, they are incredibly important. What we see and share at that age stays with us for life.

– Anthony Browne

I didn’t have picture books – there weren’t many around when I was a child.

– Anthony Browne

From 17 to 21, I was obsessed by sport and art. In art, I loved the pre-Raphaelites and Rembrandt first. Then I discovered Salvador Dali, and it was like finding something I already knew.

– Anthony Browne

Worrying can be a kind of caring, and as such is a healthy part of a balanced emotional life.

– Anthony Browne

I don’t like narrowing my readers down – there’s not a particular age or gender or nationality. I suppose I’m aiming at the child I was.

– Anthony Browne

The first things I remember drawing were battles – big sheets of paper covered in terrible scenes of carnage – though when you looked closely, there were little jokes and speech bubbles and odd things going on in the background.

– Anthony Browne

As a child, I’d always liked cowboys and Indians stories where there were two layers – gruesome in the foreground but funny in the background.

– Anthony Browne

I see ‘Hansel and Gretel’ as a breakthrough book for me, and one of the reasons is because I started to apply meaning to the hidden details.

– Anthony Browne

Pictures are as evocative to me as smells.

– Anthony Browne

Maurice Sendak is the daddy of them all when it comes to picture books – the words, the rhythm, the psychology, the design.

– Anthony Browne

I never want to make a child worried or afraid, and I don’t think I do. My pictures are born from the belief that children are far more capable and aware of social complexities than we give them credit for.

– Anthony Browne

Writers are articulate. Artists find it more difficult.

– Anthony Browne

Everyone can draw when they’re five. Most of us lose the ability.

– Anthony Browne

When I was a boy, I was a worrier, and so was my son, Joe. I used to tell him that worrying meant he had an imagination and that one day he’d be pleased.

– Anthony Browne

A lot of my characters are underdogs or sad or lonely, but I had a comfortable, golden sort of childhood.

– Anthony Browne

I grew up with an older brother who was always stronger and faster and better than me at everything, but I was close enough in age to try and compete, so we had a competitive childhood.

– Anthony Browne

I use a little brush only for really small details. Over the years, I’ve started to use a much larger brush.

– Anthony Browne

Picture books are being marginalised. I get the feeling children are being pushed away from picture books earlier and earlier and being told to look at ‘proper’ books, which means books without pictures.

– Anthony Browne

Having a memoir and a retrospective of your work running almost simultaneously when you’re still alive does feel a bit posthumous.

– Anthony Browne

I’ve always felt that I was a bit of an outsider to the British children’s-book illustration scene, because I don’t work in line and wash.

– Anthony Browne

Stories come to me in mysterious ways, more like dreams than reasoned creations.

– Anthony Browne

Stories come to me and I don’t know where they come from, but afterwards I can look back and say, ‘Oh yes, that’s got a little bit of me, or a little bit of my own son in it’. That’s where ideas come from.

– Anthony Browne

Most people lose their natural creativity at about five or six – but not me.

– Anthony Browne

M dad was a boxer, so he had this fierce, physical presence.

– Anthony Browne

Force me to choose my best book, and I always come back to ‘Gorilla.’ It was the first time I felt I understood what picture books could do.

– Anthony Browne