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Pride and Prejudice
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet
Of Mice and Men
Frankenstein

Pride and Prejudice
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet
Of Mice and Men
Frankenstein

Shaun Tan Quotes

The audience for comics has shifted dramatically. And the boundaries between books and fine arts have blurred. Maybe it’s the globalization of fine art through the Internet – it’s easy for certain groups to coalesce around a certain kind of work or medium.

– Shaun Tan

Drawing a good picture is like telling a really good lie – the key is in the incidental detail.

– Shaun Tan

It was better to be known as the kid who could draw than as the short kid.

– Shaun Tan

I became more interested in the idea of being an immigrant and particularly of being in a country you’re not familiar with. And so I began reading migrants’ stories. The fact that my father is Chinese – he emigrated from Malaysia when he was about 20 – may have had some bearing on my attraction to the subject.

– Shaun Tan

The more I draw and write, the more I realise that accidents are a necessary part of any creative act, much more so than logic or wisdom. Sometimes a mistake is the only way of arriving at an original concept, and the history of successful inventions is full of mishaps, serendipity and unintended results.

– Shaun Tan

I always overwrite – really awful, long bits of script – and then I trim it down to the bare bones and then add a little bit to colour it in. At the end of all of my stories, I test for wordless comprehension. So I remove the text and see if it works by itself. And if it does, I feel that that’s a successful story.

– Shaun Tan

As a younger person, I was obsessed with Ray Bradbury, and I think his stories did more to shape me as a storyteller than anybody else – even though, when I read them now, a lot of them seem overly sentimental. But that’s probably the writer that I’ve thought about the most, even though I don’t necessarily like a lot of his work.

– Shaun Tan

Good and bad ideas both come from the same fountain of speculation and experiment.

– Shaun Tan

I get very creative when I’m trapped in a plane and I can’t do anything else.

– Shaun Tan

I like the idea of contained emotion because I grew up most of my life feeling that way. As an adolescent, people would always say I was not expressive, and they always made the mistake of thinking that I didn’t feel anything because I didn’t react to things.

– Shaun Tan

Animals represent the abstract notion of acceptance. Living with these funny creatures – you kind of have to accept them. It’s like a test in a way.

– Shaun Tan

By itself, just to draw crazy creatures has limited appeal – if I had to give up one thing, it would be the wild imagination. When the work becomes too detached from ordinary life, it starts to fall apart. Fantasy needs to have some connection with reality, or it becomes of its own interest only, insular.

– Shaun Tan

It’s only a very small percentage of creative thinking that ends up connecting with a wider audience, and even then, any success is quite unpredictable.

– Shaun Tan

I think ‘The Road’ is a good example of a book everyone should read, but I wouldn’t recommend it to young kids.

– Shaun Tan

Seeing your work in print is exciting, especially when you’re young. It’s that feeling that you have some effect on the world outside of your immediate neighbourhood.

– Shaun Tan

Illustrating is more about communicating specific ideas to a reader. Painting is more like pure science, more about the act of painting.

– Shaun Tan

The text illustrates the pictures – it provides a connective tissue for me. I usually refine the text last, partly because pictures are harder to do, so it’s easier to edit words – I use text as grout in between the tiles of the pictures.

– Shaun Tan

Sometimes I write captions on the in-flight magazines and then replace them in the seat pocket.

– Shaun Tan

For myself, I’ve kind of always been interested in pets because they’re not human.

– Shaun Tan

Like all of my previous work – which I also hope is a bit hard to categorise – ‘The Oopsatoreum’ is an illustrated book, so a combination of words and pictures that tell a kind of story.

– Shaun Tan

You discover how confounding the world is when you try to draw it. You look at a car, and you try to see its car-ness, and you’re like an immigrant to your own world. You don’t have to travel to encounter weirdness. You wake up to it.

– Shaun Tan

I actually started out as a writer and then converted to illustration because I realised that there was a dearth of good illustrators in genre fiction, at least in Australia at that time.

– Shaun Tan

Whenever I start a project, I have a broad range of possibilities.

– Shaun Tan

When I was growing up, a lot of books affected me, but I never wrote letters to the author or anything like that. I’m always mindful that there are probably a whole bunch of people reading my books like that, too.

– Shaun Tan

Perhaps the writer I’ve read the most of is Haruki Murakami, the Japanese writer, but I wouldn’t necessarily say he’s a favourite. I read him because I find his work so intriguing, but I don’t necessarily feel I would follow this writer to the ends of the earth.

– Shaun Tan

The detail adds an element of unexpected something. All fiction is false; what makes it convincing is that it runs alongside the truth. The real world has lots of incidental details, so a painting also has to have that element of imperfection and irregularity, those incidental details.

– Shaun Tan