Anthony Browne Book Quotations

Picture books are being marginalised. I get the feeling children are being pushed away from picture books earlier and earlier and being told to look at proper books, which means books without pictures.

Maurice Sendak is the daddy of them all when it comes to picture books - the words, the rhythm, the psychology, the design.

One day, I found my dad's dressing-gown in an old suitcase, and it transported me back to when I was five and thought he was a god or a superhero who could do anything. After that, I wrote my first positive book about fathers, about my dad.

As a boy, I devoured comics but never saw what we now describe as a picture book.

Picture books are for everybody at any age, not books to be left behind as we grow older.

I hope to encourage more children to discover and love reading, but I want to focus particularly on the appreciation of picture books…. Picture books are for everybody at any age, not books to be left behind as we grow older. The best ones leave a tantalising gap between the pictures and the words, a gap that is filled by the reader's imagination, adding so much to the excitement of reading a book.