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Shaun Tan Quotes


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Quotes by Shaun Tan

Showing 1-10 of 27 Quotes by 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

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

~Shaun Tan

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

~Shaun Tan

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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

~Shaun Tan

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

~Shaun Tan

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Biography

Nationality: Australian

Type: Artist

Born: Unknown

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