Tomie dePaola Quotes

What excites me about picture books is the gap between pictures and words. Sometimes the pictures can tell a slightly different story or tell more about the story, about how someone is thinking or feeling.

In writing, I search for believability, simplicity and emotional impact.

You use simple brushstrokes in a screenplay for things over which you would take much greater pains in a novel.

Acting allows me to tell a lot of stories, you know start at the beginning, finish at the end, and tell everything in between. Modelling is just an image.

A good picture book should have events that are visually arresting - the pictures should call attention to what is happening in the story.

I think it's such a challenge to tell a story, and I think, to be honest, the shorter, the clearer, the better.

Storytelling is powerful; film particularly. We can know a lot of things intellectually, but humans really live on storytelling. Primarily with ourselves; we're all stories of our own narrative.

Filmmaking is so heavy: there are so many people and trucks and teamsters and costume people and hair people and makeup people. I try to make it light and as simple as possible. It's great for actors. It puts the story up front. It's not about shots and dollies and lighting and sets.

I would say 'Flower' had a story. It is told through the environment.

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

I use colors to bring fine points of story and character.

I was always more interested in story songs, things with a point of view... and things that informed me.

Artists don't make objects. Artists make mythologies.

When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.

Opera tells stories through the pure emotion of music. An exhibition has to tell a story purely visually. I've tried to incorporate both of those things - pure emotion and being more visual - into my writing.

I'm of the Samuel Goldwyn school of writing: If you need to send a message, call Western Union. Any messages people take away from my books are the ones they see in them.

I think stories can grow out of the visual. It can be an engine for literacy.

It's amazing what you can do without in terms of filmmaking when a story is really important.

I'm just a storyteller.

Walt put everything he knew about communication with images into the park, so it was very familiar.

The sizes and shapes of the panels have never been important to my stories. It has always been the words and images that drew me in, kind of like watching a movie.

I wanted to be a writer as a teen... so storytelling was my first love. In my late teens, design became an obsession as I realized that I could express myself through the medium. Much later, when I founded Fuseproject in 1999, our slogan became 'design brings stories to life.'

I want a nice picture book with 12 pictures - I do my best with that format.

Just telling a story. That's cinema. It's not silent, black and white. It's a simple story that's well made.

Illustrations can be a big window: a looking glass into the author's imagination.