Perhaps the writer I’ve read the most of is Haruki Murakami, the Japanese writer, but I wouldn’t necessarily say he’s a favourite. I read him because I find his work so intriguing, but I don’t necessarily feel I would follow this writer to the ends of the earth. Shaun Tan Read Quote
When I was growing up, a lot of books affected me, but I never wrote letters to the author or anything like that. I’m always mindful that there are probably a whole bunch of people reading my books like that, too. Shaun Tan Read Quote
The audience for comics has shifted dramatically. And the boundaries between books and fine arts have blurred. Maybe it’s the globalization of fine art through the Internet – it’s easy for certain groups to coalesce around a certain kind of work or medium. Shaun Tan Read Quote
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 Read Quote
Sometimes I write captions on the in-flight magazines and then replace them in the seat pocket. Shaun Tan Read Quote
It’s only a very small percentage of creative thinking that ends up connecting with a wider audience, and even then, any success is quite unpredictable. Shaun Tan Read Quote
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 Read Quote
As a younger person, I was obsessed with Ray Bradbury, and I think his stories did more to shape me as a storyteller than anybody else – even though, when I read them now, a lot of them seem overly sentimental. But that’s probably the writer that I’ve thought about the most, even though I don’t necessarily like a lot of his work. Shaun Tan Read Quote
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 Read Quote
