Picture Book Quotes

The Recent Past

Perhaps we ought to feel with more imagination.
As today the sky 70 degrees above zero with lines falling
The way September moves a lace curtain to be near a pear,
The oddest device can't be usual. And that is where
The pejorative sense of fear moves axles. In the stars
There is no longer any peace, emptied like a cup of coffee
Between the blinding rain that interviews.

You were my quintuplets when I decided to leave you
Opening a picture book the pictures were all of grass
Slowly the book was on fire, you the reader
Sitting with specs full of smoke exclaimed
How it was a rhyme for "brick" or "redder."
The next chapter told all about a brook.
You were beginning to see the relation when a tidal wave
Arrived with sinking ships that spelled out "Aladdin."
I thought about the Arab boy in his cave
But the thoughts came faster than advice.
If you knew that snow was a still toboggan in space
The print could rhyme with "fallen star. ~ John Ashbery

I first heard the term "meta-novel" at a writer's conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The idea is that even though each book in a series stands alone, when read collectively they form one big ongoing novel about the main character. Each book represents its own arc: in book one of the series we meet the character and establish a meta-goal that will carry him through further books, in book two that meta-goal is tested, in book three - you get the picture. ~ Carolyn Wheat

I think the trick of writing a good picture book manuscript is to leave that space for illustration. An illustrated novel can do the same thing. ~ Mac Barnett

A picture book is a motorcycle: small, loud, fun, and zippy.
An easy reader is a chartered bus: obliged to carry a rather dull passenger roster of sanctioned curriculum, plus the baggage of an approved, limited vocabulary. The trick is to design your chartered bus to be as cool and sexy as a motorcycle. ~ Mo Willems

I'm usually working either on a picture book and a young adult book, or a middle grade book and a young adult book. When I get bored with one, I move to the other, and then I go back. ~ Jacqueline Woodson

Consider a small child sitting on his mother's lap while she reads him a picture book. The picture book opens to a width that effectively places the child at the center of a closed circle - that of mother's body, arms, and the picture book ... That circle, so private and intimate, is a place apart form the demands and stresses of daily life, a sanctuary in and from which the child can explore the many worlds offered in picture books. Despite all of our society's technological advances, it still just takes one child, one book, and one reader, to create this unique space, to work this everyday magic. ~ Martha V. Parravano

Toilet paper unrolled and slithered
then wrapped around my tummy.
That paper tried to roll me up
into an Egyptian mummy. ~ Melinda K. Trotter

If you dance, you'll feel more joyful. Just thinking isn't going to make you feel better. Think about how joyful you'll feel as you dance. Don't repeat the foolishness of putting off dancing as you debate whether dance will really bring you joy. We feel joy as soon as we dance. Everything is like that. ~ Ilchi Lee

But for a moment I had sat on the turf somewhere high above the flow of the sea and the sound of the woods, had seen the house, the garden, and the waves breaking. The old nurse who turns the pages of the picture book had stopped and had said, 'Look. This is the truth. ~ Virginia Woolf

Emotionally, I have no picture-book illustrated with memories of my first five years, but externally, I have impressions that possess a haunting vividness comparable only to the texture of dreams, when dreams are tumultuously alive. ~ E.F. Benson

I have to write what I can write, and writing the text of a picture book is like walking a tightrope, if you ramble off ... As my friend Julius Lester says, 'A picture book is the essence of an experience.' ~ Patricia MacLachlan

Obscenity is not a quality inherent in a book or picture, but is solely and exclusively a contribution of the reading mind, and hence cannot be defined in terms of the qualities of a book or picture. ~ Theodore Schroeder

I am a believer in angels, though not the picture-book kind with wings and harps. Such angelic accoutrements seem as nonsensical to me as devils sporting horns and carrying pitchforks. To me, angel wings are merely symbolic of their role as divine messengers. ~ Richard Paul Evans

The poet discovers that what men value as substances have a higher value as symbols; that Nature is the immense shadow of man. A man's action is only a picture-book of his creed. He does after what he believes. Your condition, your employment, is the fable of you. The world is thoroughly anthropomorphized, as if it had passed through the body and mind of man, and taken his mould and form. Indeed, good poetry is always personification, and heightens every species of force in nature by giving it a human volition. We are advertised that there is nothing to which man is not related; that everything is convertible into every other. The staff in his hand is the radius vector of the sun. The chemistry of this is the chemistry of that. Whatever one act we do, whatever one thing we learn, we are doing and learning all things, - marching in the direction of universal power. Every healthy mind is a true Alexander or Sesostris, building a universal monarchy. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The first book I could call mine, my first book, was a picture book, 'The Magic Monkey' - it was adapted from an old Chinese legend by a thirteen-year-old prodigy named Plato Chan with the help of his sister. ~ Nick Flynn

A picture book is a small door to the enormous world of the visual arts, and they're often the first art a young person sees. ~ Tomie DePaola

For children: I'm writing a picture book about the Big Dipper and a novel about a cricket, a firefly and a vole. For grownups: I'm writing poems. ~ Kate DiCamillo

We're authors, too," Donegan said, "and we've been trying to get into the picture-book market. We have this idea for a Where's Wally type thing, except in ours, you'd have to find the one living person hiding in among all the dismembered corpses while the chainsaw-wielding killer hunts him down. You know, for kids."
"We're going to call is Save the Survivor," Gracious said. ~ Derek Landy

My daughter has seen the transition from struggling screenwriter to successful picture book author, and she's enjoyed it very much because she's a wonderful little kid. And she's always believed in her daddy. ~ Drew Daywalt

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. ~ Anthony Browne

The Herb Farm reminded Marguerite of the farms in France; it was like a farm in a child's picture book. There was a white wooden fence that penned in sheep and goats, a chicken coop where a dozen warm eggs cost a dollar, a red barn for the two bay horses, and a greenhouse. Half of the greenhouse did what greenhouses do, while the other half had been fashioned into very primitive retail space. The vegetables were sold from wooden crates, all of them grown organically, before such a process even had a name- corn, tomatoes, lettuces, seventeen kinds of herbs, squash, zucchini, carrots with the bushy tops left on, spring onions, radishes, cucumbers, peppers, strawberries for two short weeks in June, pumpkins after the fifteenth of September. There was chèvre made on the premises from the milk of the goats; there was fresh butter. And when Marguerite showed up for the first time in the summer of 1975 there was a ten-year-old boy who had been given the undignified job of cutting zinnias, snapdragons, and bachelor buttons and gathering them into attractive-looking bunches. ~ Elin Hilderbrand

Let's put it this way: if you are a novelist, I think you start out with a 20 word idea, and you work at it and you wind up with a 200,000 word novel. We, picture-book people, or at least I, start out with 200,000 words and I reduce it to 20. ~ Eric Carle

Metaphors help you boil down the complications and ambiguities of your too-long life into a picture book. They help you lie to yourself ~ Olen Steinhauer

They judge me like a picture book,
For the colours like they forgot to read ~ Lana Del Rey

Late afternoon, a package arrives addressed to me. Inside is a picture book and the title is Hansel and Gretel. It is the most beautiful book. It has a golden spine and the pictures are shining with color.
I read the whole book over and over again and then I read it to Greta, who clings to me afterwards.
"It is all right," I say to her. "It is just a story. Things like that don't really happen. ~ Gemma Liviero

For, to a child, the oddest of things, and the most richly coloured picture-book, is that his mother was once a child also. ~ J.M. Barrie

The Polar Express was the easiest of my picture book manuscripts to write ... Once I realized the train was going to the North Pole, finding the story seemed less like a creative effort than an act of recollection. I felt, like the storys narrator, that I was remembering something, not making it up. ~ Chris Van Allsburg

Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat is a picture book meritable of every child reader, whether he or she is just a beginner, or a bit more advanced. ("Reviews by Cat Ellington: The Complete Anthology, Vol. 1," 2018) ~ Cat Ellington

Far away, where the swallows take refuge in winter, lived a king who had eleven sons and one daughter, Elise. The eleven brothers
they were all princes
used to go to school with stars on their breasts and swords at their sides. They wrote upon golden slates with diamond pencils, and could read just as well without a book as with one, so there was no mistake about their being princes. Their sister Elise sat upon a little footstool of looking-glass, and she has a picture-book which had cost the half of a kingdom. Oh, these children were very happy; but it was not to last thus forever. ~ Hans Christian Andersen

Another danger is that - as is already happening to some extent - authors and editors run scared and go to absurd lengths to avoid giving offence. (An American editor rejected Polar, a picture book about a toy polar bear which is published in England by Andre Deutsch, on the ground that the text, written by Elaine Moss, states explicitly that the bear is white). A demand to avoid stereotypes can easily become in effect a demand for a different stereotype: for instance that girls should always be shown as strong, brave and resourceful, and that mothers should always have jobs and never, never wear an apron. And books written to an approved formula, or with deliberate didactic aim, do not often have the breath of life. Some members of women's groups in North America have published their own anti-sexist books, featuring such characters as fire-fighting girls or boys who learn to crochet. Good luck to them; but those I have seen are far below professional standard.

("Are Children's Books Racist and Sexist?" from Only Connect, 2nd ed., 1980) ~ John Rowe Townsend

I sculpted for four or five years. Mostly for my own amusement, I decided to do a picture book, and that was kind of a turning point. ~ Chris Van Allsburg

As a form, the picture book has a similar elegance to the short story. ~ Gabrielle Zevin

Jill showed friend Kay the cute white mice.
They liked to run races for cheese.
Mice were lots of fun to play with.
Jill said, "Take Poopsie, the male one, please! ~ Melinda K. Trotter

Heaven is boring. Didn't you see, in that picture book back when we used to go to school? It's just plain and white and there is not even any color and it's too orderly. Like there will be crazy prefects telling you all the time: Do thus, don't do that, where are your shoes, tuck in your shirt, shhh, God doesn't like it and will punish you, keep your voice low you'll wake the angels, go and wash, you are dirty, Bastard says.
Me, when I die I want to go where there's lots of food and music and a party that never ends and we're singing that Jobho song, Godknows says. ~ NoViolet Bulawayo

A good picture book can almost be whistled ... All have their own melodies behind the storytelling. ~ Margaret Wise Brown

A man's action is only a picture book of his creed. ~ Arthur Helps

When you start writing a picture book, you have to write a manuscript that has enough language to prompt the illustrator to get his or her gears running, but then you end up having to cut it out because you don't want any of the language to be redundant to the pictures that are being drawn. ~ Daniel Handler

Painting is the only universal language. All nature is creation's picture book. Painting alone can describe every thing which can be seen, and suggest every emotion which can be felt. Art reaches back into the babyhood of time, and is man's only lasting monument. ~ William Morris Hunt

With twins, reading aloud to them was the only chance I could get to sit down. I read them picture books until they were reading on their own. ~ Beverly Cleary

Writing a picture book is like writing 'War and Peace' in Haiku. ~ Mem Fox

Whatever I'm thinking about has got to fit into thirty-two pages, the standard picture book size. So that's something. But the structure and the form for me are almost the most important, because these will express as much as words and images will the content of the work. ~ Chris Raschka

The images in a picture book are the driving forces that tell the story. The words tell only what the pictures can't. ~ Dan Yaccarino

I like working in children's books because it gives rise to such a variety of jobs. One month it may be a picture book, the next a retelling, the next a play, a short story or the start of the next novel. ~ Geraldine McCaughrean

If it's just brushstrokes wrestling around, it isn't much of a picture book, is it? There still has to be a picture. And maybe it needs to be a picture of a dog named Daisy or a little girl riding a bike. So I have to be careful before I get too carried away in the manner itself. ~ Chris Raschka

If kids like a picture book, they're going to read it at least 50 times, and their parents are going to have to read it with them. Read anything that often, and even minor imperfections start to feel like gravel in the bed. ~ Mark Haddon

When I feel angry, I want to say something mean, or yell, or hit. But feeling like I want to is not the same as doing it. Feeling can't hurt anyone or get me into trouble, but doing can. (Bunny from picture book) ~ Cornelia Maude Spelman

If I could tell you about Red
I would sing to you of fire Sweet like cherries
Burning like cinnamon Smelling like a rose in the sun ~ Dixie Dawn Miller Goode

My first favourite book was 'Are You My Mother?' A picture book about a lost bird. After that my favourites changed almost yearly. I loved everything by Roald Dahl, but my favourite was probably 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.' A librarian gave me a first edition of that book, which I treasure. ~ Rick Yancey

I'm just surprised you can understand it. Is it the picture book edition? ~ Jus Accardo

Every day is a good day if we are reading a picture book. ~ Vivian Kirkfield

On the steps leading to a door
was a scrub brush that was blue.
I snatched it quick and ran for home
because it was just the thing to chew. ~ Melinda K. Trotter

The novels take longer to write than the picture book texts, and they do take a different sort of concentration. However, a very short, simple story that works well is just as exciting to me as any longer and more complex book. ~ Margaret Mahy

There's not too much difference between writing a picture book and writing a collection of a hundred poems or so, except that the bigger books take a lot longer to do. ~ Jack Prelutsky

Whether it's music, loss of something, loneliness or friendship - if that emotion is heightened in some way and painted to fit in between the covers of 32 pages, that can become a picture book. ~ Chris Raschka

But mostly because he could be himself - never needing to bend. ~ Niki Alling

It is a good idea to know which publishers publish which stories. For example, there is no sense in sending a picture book text to a publisher who does not publish picture books. ~ Margaret Mahy

Housekeeping is incredibly difficult with three kids. I'm trying to be more relaxed. You'll go insane if you try to have a picture-book house. ~ Patrick Dempsey

In my light-headedness and fatigue, which made me feel drastically cut off from myself and as if I were observing it all at a remove, I walked past candy shops and coffee shops and shops with antique toys and Delft tiles from the 1800s, old mirrors and silver glinting in the rich, cognac-colored light, inlaid French cabinets and tables in the French court style with garlanded carvings and veneerwork that would have made Hobie gasp with admiration - in fact the entire foggy, friendly, cultivated city with its florists and bakeries and antiekhandels reminded me of Hobie, not just for its antique-crowded richness but because there was a Hobie-like wholesomeness to the place, like a children's picture book where aproned tradespeople swept the floors and tabby cats napped in sunny windows. But there was much too much to see, and ~ Donna Tartt

With each butterfly´s arrival, there´s a chance for me to be the adult incarnation of the little girl in the picture book I once loved. ~ Ronlyn Domingue

Las Vegas has become a child's picture-book dream of a city-here a storybook castle, there a sphinx-flanked black pyramid beaming white light into the darkness as a landing beam for UFOs, and everywhere neon oracles and twisting screens predict happiness and good fortune, announce singers and comedians and magicians in residence or on their way, and the lights always flash and beckon and call. Once every hour a volcano erupts in light and flame. Once every hour a pirate ship sinks a man o'war. ~ Neil Gaiman

My goal with The Adventures of Captain Underpants was to invent a style which was almost identical to that of a picture book - in a novel format. So I wrote incredibly short chapters and tried to fill each page with more pictures than words. I wanted to create a book that kids who don't like to read would want to read. ~ Dav Pilkey

Who am I? is not a question about your job or bank balance. Don't be satisfied with rational or formal answers. Ask yourself seriously and honestly, again and again, and, sooner or later, you'll hear the voice of your soul. The true answer will come to you, breaking through the thick curtain of your ego, which is made up of your name, job, personality, and similar things. ~ Ilchi Lee

Which brings us to a little book that may provide a clue to the cure. My wife got it as a gift from a friend. It is titled Porn for Women. It's a picture book of hunks, photographed in all their chiseled, muscle-bound, testosterone-marinated, PG-rated glory. Lots of naked chests and low-cut jeans, complete with tousled hair and beckoning eyes. And they are ALL doing housework. There's a picture of a well-cut Adonis, and he's loading the washing machine. The caption reads: "As soon as I finish the laundry, I'll do the grocery shopping. And I'll take the kids with me so you can relax." There's another hunk, the cover guy, vacuuming the floor. A particularly athletic-looking man peers up from the sports section and declares, "Ooh, look, the NFL playoffs are today. I bet we'll have no trouble parking at the crafts fair". Porn for Women. Available at a marriage near you. ~ Anonymous

They judge me like a picture book, by the colors, like they forgot to read. ~ Lana Del Rey

I don't have an interest in any car that isn't good for the environment, other than maybe an aesthetic quality in a picture book. ~ Emile Hirsch

I just did a picture book called The Wildest Brother on Earth, and you will find both of my children in there. ~ Cornelia Funke

Even tiny children looking at a picture book are using their imaginations, gleaning clues from the images to understand what is happening, and perhaps using the throwaway details which the illustrator includes to add their own elements to the story. ~ Philip Reeve

I think of writing
particularly of writing picture books
as a kind of choreography. A picture book must have pace and movement and pattern. Pictures and text should, together, create the pattern, rather than simply run parallel. ~ Beatrice Schenk De Regniers

The whole of world history often seems to me nothing more than a picture book which portrays humanity's most powerful and a senseless desire - the desire to forget. Does not each generation, by means of suppression, concealment, and ridicule, efface what the previous generation considered most important? ~ Hermann Hesse

Try not to be a man of success, but a man of value." - Albert Einstein ~ Kate Larkinson

On the other couch a women sits with a young boy looking through a picture book about Babar the Elephant. When I find a magazine and I lean back to start reading it, I can see the women watching me out of the corner of her eye. She moves closer to the child and she leans over and kisses his forehead. I know why she does it and i don't blame her. ~ James Frey

You need a theme in a picture book just as much or maybe even more than you need it in a novel. ~ Eve Bunting

Getting to the point where I was ready to write a book has been about a 20-year journey of being, really honestly, too afraid to try - which I think is pretty common for people who are trying to write a large piece of fiction. ~ Patrick Carman

Solara: I want to come with you.
Eli: No, you don't.
Solara: I hate it here.
Eli: Then change it. ~ Book Of Eli Movie

Just because something is typed-whether it is typed on a business card or typed in a newspaper or book-this does not mean that it is true. ~ Lemony Snicket

Where are you, Adam? According to the book of Genesis, Adam went into hiding after the fall. By trying to be more than human, Adam felt less than human. Before the fall, Adam was not ashamed; after the fall he was. Toxic shame is true agony. It is a pain felt from the inside, in the core of our being. It is excruciatingly painful. ~ John Bradshaw

When we sit down to meditate, we connect with something unconditional - a state of mind, a basic environment that does not grasp or reject anything. Meditation is probably the only activity that doesn't add anything to the picture. Everything is allowed to come and go without further embellishment. Meditation is a totally nonviolent, non aggressive occupation. Not filling the space, allowing for the possibility of connecting with unconditional openness - this provides the basis for real change. ~ Pema Chodron

The megaselling books by celebrities are not so much books as products. ~ John Berendt

Where peace
And rest can never dwell, hope never comes,
That comes to all. ~ John Milton

Success is walking out of here with the title, and anything less is not good enough in my book. ~ Pete Sampras

The beauty of the picture is an abiding concrete of the painter's vision. ~ Hartley Coleridge

I am a big believer in the fact that all authors really write only one book. ~ Scott Turow

Every town, every book, is a way to say, look, there's a new way, a different way. Every book in a bookstore is a fresh beginning. Every book is the next iteration of a very old story. Every bookstore, therefore, is like a safe‑ deposit box for civilization. ~ Liam Callanan

Few coffee shops have books, fewer have good books, and even less will have one book that can change your whole life. Now, the question is: How many people can find that book? And, among those who do, how many will read it? Because, you see, life always provides opportunities, but not many can see them, when they're just there, waiting to be found, when they come our way, even if in the most unexpected place in the world. One has to be very sharp to recognize a window of opportunity in a wall of illusions. And the ability to redirect attention, demands that one can be capable as well of knowing his own limitations in the vast sea of energy and vibrations. Now, I could be talking about a book, a group or a person, as the axiom remains true to itself. ~ Robin Sacredfire

Whoever thinks algebra is a trick in obtaining unknowns has thought it in vain. No attention should be paid to the fact that algebra and geometry are different in appearance. Algebras (jabbre and maqabeleh) are geometric facts which are proved by propositions five and six of Book two of Elements. ~ Omar Khayyam

The thing I can't remember is, what came first? Us or the book? ~ Michael De Luca

Humor expands our limited picture frame and gets us to see more than just our problem. ~ Allen Klein

We believe in a moral code. Communism denies innate right or wrong. As W. Cleon Skousen has said in his timely book, The Naked Communist: The communist 'has convinced himself that nothing is evil which answers the call of expediency.' This is a most damnable doctrine. People who truly accept such a philosophy have neither conscience nor honor. Force, trickery, lies, broken promises are wholly justified. ~ Ezra Taft Benson

What you don't know would make a great book. ~ Sydney Smith

All that is made seems planless to the darkened mind, because there are more plans than it looked for. ~ C.S. Lewis

Every man's world picture is and always remains a construct of his mind and cannot be proved to have any other existence. ~ Erwin Schrodinger

Hell--or Heaven--is here, now, inside. ~ Jean Russell

Hanna Krall's book Shielding the Flame drew on the experience of Dr. Marek Edelman, who before he died in 2009 was the sole survivor of the five-person command that led the April 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. ~ Chris Hedges

I've always written a little bit. I mean, I've written screenplays, and I've doctored my dialogue for years, and I've written speeches - I was a speechwriter on 'The West Wing,' so I like that kind of thing. But I never really thought I'd write a book. ~ Rob Lowe

Brian Myers takes a fresh approach. He largely ignores what the regime tells the outside world about itself, but concentrates instead on what North Koreans themselves are supposed to believe, paying special attention to the North Korean narratives and mass culture, including movies and television shows. ( ... ) There are few books that can give the world a peek into the Hermit Kingdom. The Cleanest Race provides a reason to care about how those in North Korea see themselves and the West. It is possibly the best addition to that small library. ~ Andrei Lankov

For two years I've read the scrolls and learned the language, and I know more about magick than anyone here...You ask what the greatest power is, and I know that niether the dwarf magick of Terus, nor the dragon power of Victus is superior, even though I should say that Terus is because my father's a Mender and his spells come from the Green book. Even the elf magick that is so rare that none in Darton is a master or matron of it, is still just one of the three colours and no better than any other. That's the whole point of the system, and it's stupid...None of the scrolls explain anything, and niether do you. Instead we have to run around an obstacle course, trade jewels between rings and sit here and write rubbish answers to a trick question. And to end it all we have to listen to a Wizard from Celenia and hope to hear some more spells. Well I know as many spells as anyone here, but they're as useless as whistling to me. ~ T.B. McKenzie

Three things. Three things are all I'll ever ask of you. Never lie to me, never say anything you don't mean, and always give me your pleasure. It's the only things I'll ever want. ~Grayson Mandrake ~ Marie Skye

She was very beautiful and he felt he loved her. She was not beautiful as a state or a picture is beautiful; she was beautiful as a meadow across which the wind blows. It was life that pulsed in her and that had formed her into what she was. ~ Erich Maria Remarque

The publication of a book only brings very paltry results to its author. ~ George Sand

In the middle of this journey, we lose a bit of ourselves. We do not know where we are or where we're headed. We look for directions, seek for guidance, and if we're lucky, we find it without too much time lost. And if we're truly lucky, we gain our whole selves back, with an ounce of wisdom on top. ~ Joanne Crisner