Shaun Tan

“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.”

“Seeing your work in print is exciting, especially when you're young. It's that feeling that you have some effect on the world outside of your immediate neighbourhood.”

“It was better to be known as the kid who could draw than as the short kid.”

“There is an implicit recognition here that important things in life are not always immediately visible, and can't always be named, or even fully understood. Others still are entirely imaginary -- like a red tree growing suddenly in a room -- although this does not make them any less real.”

“Drawing a good picture is like telling a really good lie - the key is in the incidental detail.”

“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.”

“Sometimes I write captions on the in-flight magazines and then replace them in the seat pocket.”

“Like all of my previous work - which I also hope is a bit hard to categorise - 'The Oopsatoreum' is an illustrated book, so a combination of words and pictures that tell a kind of story.”

“By itself, just to draw crazy creatures has limited appeal - if I had to give up one thing, it would be the wild imagination. When the work becomes too detached from ordinary life, it starts to fall apart. Fantasy needs to have some connection with reality, or it becomes of its own interest only, insular.”

“For myself, I've kind of always been interested in pets because they're not human.”