Quentin Blake Quotations

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

With my pictures, what I hope is that it encourages the reader to imagine more pictures of his own.

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.

I'm trained as a teacher; that's the only thing I've got a certificate for.

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.

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

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

Being positive may be a character defect of mine.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

You see, I don't draw from life at all, but I do look out of my window a lot.

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

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.

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 draw every day - unless I'm being interviewed.

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

Sometimes I think people get into trouble because they can't say what they want to.

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

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 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.

It was an accident of circumstance that I never married.

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

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.

A lot of my travel is at least partly work, visiting schools and libraries, especially in France.

The hateful thing about most hotels nowadays is that they only have duvets. I hate duvets.

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 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 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.