Shaun Tan famous quotes

04-12-2025

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 youâ€™re like an immigrant to your own world. You donâ€™t have to travel to encounter weirdness. You wake up to it.
-- Shaun Tan

#Car #Trying #Wake Up
So you want to hear a story? Well, I used to know a whole lot of pretty interesting ones. Some of them so funny you'd laugh yourself unconscious, others so terrible you'd never want to repeat them. But I can't remember any of those. So I'll just tell you about the time I found that lost thing....
-- Shaun Tan

#Laughing #Interesting #Stories
Depression is the flip side of creative inspiration but it can be useful. It's telling you to stop for a little bit. You can become so fully absorbed in the world of creative work that it can lead to some imbalance in your life.
-- Shaun Tan

#Art #Inspiration #Creative
As an artist, even if you are putting out something really dark and disturbing, that's good because it's opening a discussion. Always in the back of my mind is this thought that the world has to be a better place with you in it.
-- Shaun Tan

#Art #Dark #Mind
I'm often wary of using the word 'inspiration' to introduce my work -- it sounds too much like a sun shower from the heavens, absorbed by a passive individual enjoying an especially receptive moment. While that may be the case on rare occasions, the reality is usually far more prosaic. Staring at a blank piece of paper, I can't think of anything original. I feel utterly uninspired and unreceptive. It's the familiar malaise of 'artist's block' and in such circumstances there is only one thing to do: just start drawing.
-- Shaun Tan

#Block #Inspiration #Reality
Today is the tomorrow you were promised yesterday.
-- Shaun Tan

#Yesterday #Today #Tomorrow
Sometimes the day begins with nothing to look forward to...
-- Shaun Tan

#Looks #Sometimes
Yes, we all know that there's a good chance the missiles won't work properly when the government people finally come to get them, but over the years we've stopped worrying about that. Deep down, most of us feel it's probably better this way. After all, if there are families in faraway countries with their own backyard missiles, armed and pointed back at us, we would hope that they too have found a much better use for them.
-- Shaun Tan

#Country #Government #Years
The Federal Department of Odds and Ends: sweepus underum carpetae.
-- Shaun Tan

#Odds #Odds And Ends #Ends
I don't get really inspired the way some people do, buzzing with ideas - it feels like hard work to me... but once I get hooked into the universe of a particular work it becomes almost like an aesthetic addiction.
-- Shaun Tan

#Art #Hard Work #Ideas

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