“And when you died I took you down to the river. And when I died you waited for me by the shore. So it was that time passed between us.”
Author detail
Shaun Tan (born in 1974) is an Australian artist, writer, and film maker. He won an Academy Award for *The Lost Thing*, a 2011 animated film adaptation of a 2000 picture book he wrote and illustrated. Other books he has written and illustrated include *The Red Tree* and *The Arrival*. **Source**: [Shaun Tan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaun_Tan) on Wikipedia.
Quotes
Showing 1-12 of 12
“And when you died I took you down to the river. And when I died you waited for me by the shore. So it was that time passed between us.”
“Good and bad ideas both come from the same fountain of speculation and experiment.”
“Sometimes I write captions on the in-flight magazines and then replace them in the seat pocket.”
“The more I draw and write, the more I realise that accidents are a necessary part of any creative act, much more so than logic or wisdom. Sometimes a mistake is the only way of arriving at a...”
“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.”
“Drawing a good picture is like telling a really good lie - the key is in the incidental detail.”
“Illustrating is more about communicating specific ideas to a reader. Painting is more like pure science, more about the act of painting.”
“The detail adds an element of unexpected something. All fiction is false; what makes it convincing is that it runs alongside the truth. The real world has lots of incidental details, so a pa...”
“My friend Markus Zusak wrote a story from the point of view of death, 'The Book Thief.' I thought that's a great idea, where your omniscient narrator is death. I'm glad he had that idea beca...”
“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...”
“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 word...”
“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.”