Anthony Browne Quotes

The first thing I put down on paper is a storyboard, like a film director.

As adults, we've seen so much before that we often turn the pages of a picture book without really looking. Young children tend to look more carefully.

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.

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.

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.

You can never have 'equality' between two things that are not equal by definition. And so, for example, you can have equality among 'people', but not between 'men' and 'women'.

I didn't have picture books - there weren't many around when I was a child.

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.

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

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.

When I talk to children, I show them a typical drawing I made when I was six and point out to them that when I was their age, I didn't draw any better than any of them.

As a father, I understand the importance of the bond that develops through reading picture books with your child.

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.

Never forget that children are at the heart of everything we do. Respect them, listen to them, talk to them as equals, and care about them.

I played rugby from the age of 10 until my late twenties; an unlikely player - small, quiet, long-haired and 'wiry.'

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

Although I have two good Anglepoise lights, I much prefer to work by daylight.

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.

Something happens to our creativity as we go through the education process; most of us lose touch with it.

Inspiring passion in children for books, and the world of imagination and creativity fuelled by them, is a fundamental reason for why the Children's Laureate post exists.

One day, I found my dad's dressing-gown in an old suitcase, and it transported me back to when I was five and thought he was a god or a superhero who could do anything. After that, I wrote my first positive book about fathers, about my dad.

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.

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

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.

Many adults that I have met in my time believed that picture books are 'babyish'. I hope I have changed minds on this, as I set out to do.

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

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.

DEFINITION Political correctness is an ideology that classifies certain groups of people as victims in need of protection from criticism, and which makes believers feel that no dissent should be tolerated.

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.

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.

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

I grew up in Yorkshire, and once or twice a year, we'd travel over the Pennines to see my cousins in Cheshire.

Writers are articulate. Artists find it more difficult.