Quentin Blake Quotes

Being positive may be a character defect of mine.

I find that I can't work and listen to radio - either I find I don't like it and it distracts me, or I do like it and I want to listen to it.

I think it is important for children to read different things to find out about their emotions and other people's emotions. It is an enormous source of education and culture.

I don't like leaving work behind. I hate the idea that something might be happening on the drawing board at home that I am going to miss.

I have an assistant who's very good at email, so I don't struggle with it.

I know some children's writers write for specific children, or for the children they once were, but I never have. I just thought children might like my sort of visual humour.

Guinea pigs are quite difficult to draw, I think, because they're so furry.

I don't feel as if I belong to an age group.

I don't wait for inspiration. I'm not, in fact, quite sure what inspiration is, but I'm sure that if it is going to turn up, my having started work is the precondition of its arrival.

As an illustrator you need to understand the human body - but having looked at and understood nature, you must develop an ability to look away and capture the balance between what you've seen and what you imagine.

Television is kind of a disappointment. I often want to watch it, but I find it quite hard - I don't like soaps, reality TV or celebrity chefs.

Well, one always has an instinct to be a painter, and I've done quite a lot of painting at one time or another, though not with any public success.

I thought that if I couldn't make a living as an artist, at least I shouldn't starve.

By the time I had finished these studies, I had realized that I simply did not draw well enough to be the kind of artist and illustrator that I wanted to be, and so for two days a week over two years I drew - and drew and drew - from the models in the life classes at Chelsea School of Art. I really found out how people looked and moved and balanced, and though nowadays I almost never use a sketchbook and just make everything up as I go along, it's those days in the life room that are the back of it all.

Inspiration is some mysterious blessing which happens when the wheels are turning smoothly.

I love the sea, but I avoid any sort of seaside resort that has skyscrapers or seaside entertainments.

I've never quite worked out how to do holidays. I've got a house in France which I suppose is a kind of holiday house. But it's really only so I can go on drawing when I get there. I'm never far away from the feeling that I want to be getting on with something.

I don't think there's an illustrator who's as good as a Titian or a Rembrandt ... but then, Rembrandt was a bit of an illustrator on the quiet, you know?

I don't have anything interesting to conceal or reveal in my private life, and it is really only my work and professional life that I want to talk about.

If you want to read and you want to draw, that helps you to express yourself.

It was an accident of circumstance that I never married.

I do like children, but only as people. Not as if they're a special category.

I suppose illustration tends to live in the streets, rather than in the hermetically sealed atmosphere of the museum, and consequently it has come to be taken less seriously.

I think it is the fact that birds are two-legged, like us, which gives them something of our balance and gesture and makes them nearer to us.

Sometimes people think drawing and painting is mucking about when actually it is a highly skilled activity.

Going to hospital is rather like going to an alien planet.