Top 13 Chris Raschka Quotes

To learn to ride a bicycle, as with the other great noble human inventions, is a hugely complex activity. Generally, it requires three things: the learner, the teacher and the bicycle, all in the same place at the same time, most often outside someplace.

Can you really learn to knit from a diagram? Try it. Do you want to learn to ski or surf by yourself? You could drown or run into a tree.

For the continued survival of our planet and humanity, it is crucial that certain discoveries and skills and inventions made by people over the years be passed on from one human generation to the next, from one person, face-to-face, to another.

When I present the Charlie Parker book, I do a call and response that works quite well. With the Thelonious Monk book, I play the music and work with kids in a group to create a color wheel and show how the wheel can be mapped on a 12-tone chromatic scale.

I wasn’t always minimal. In the early days, I was laying it on as thickly as I could, trying very hard to get it right. But I found that the harder I tried, the more tired whatever it was I was working on looked. And then I grew tired of it as well.

I want each and every entire brushstroke to be seen. I want the marks made by the tip of the brush to carry as much meaning as the marks made by the dragging tail end, the part that splits open as the paint pulls away, thins and dries.

Whatever I’m thinking about has got to fit into thirty-two pages, the standard picture book size. So that’s something. But the structure and the form for me are almost the most important, because these will express as much as words and images will the content of the work.

Openness is something any teacher strives to instill in his or her students.

Any teacher in the arts and sciences has to maintain a sense of childlikeness to be truly inventive.

It will always take a certain audacity to write or to make art of any kind.

Whether it’s music, loss of something, loneliness or friendship – if that emotion is heightened in some way and painted to fit in between the covers of 32 pages, that can become a picture book.

I never quite know if what I do will be understood.

With any book, I try to find where the manner of the making of the book is appropriate to the matter of the subject.