A Quote by Michelle Phan

Art was a way for me to express myself and for me to also escape because it was tough growing up as a child. We didn't have a lot of money. I was always creating. I was writing stories. I was doing comic books. I made my own universe.
I feel like in the reading I did when I was growing up, and also in the way that people talk and tell stories here in the South, they use a lot of figurative language. The stories that I heard when I was growing up, and the stories that I read, taught me to use the kind of language that I do. It's hard for me to work against that when I am writing.
Growing up, my dad would be gone a lot. But I knew what he was doing, and I wanted to one day enjoy that. When I saw how tired he was when he got home, that, in a direct way, prepared me and made me realize what a tough business this is.
I created my own concept art and went in and did a 90-minute presentation that cost me a lot of money.And, the great thing is though, when I got the job, they had to buy all of it from me, because one of the set pieces in the middle of the movie was the scene I wrote, and they needed to own everything because a lot of it ended up being the movie we made, so I got all my money back. I was committed. I was going to outspend every competing director.
I had done some community theater plays and I just had so much fun doing it. I was a really shy kid growing up and it gave me a platform to be able to express myself in a way that I didn't feel comfortable doing yet in my own skin.
I always enjoyed art history because, growing up in California, my exposure was limited, and it was a new experience. To learn the history of art opened up certain things to me, made me see. It intrigued me.
Growing up, I was always wearing my brother's hand-me-downs, so nothing ever fit me. I told myself whenever I have my own money and my own choice with what I get to wear, it's always going to fit me correctly.
I drew the same things that most boys drew - airplanes and cars and fire engines. Then later on I discovered comic books, and I began to create my own comic stories. I was a comic writer, even when I was five or six years old. I would just make up stories because I thought it was fun.
I read a lot of comic books and any kind of thing I could find. One day, a teacher found me. She grabbed my comic book and tore it up. I was really upset, but then she brought in a pile of books from her own library. That was the best thing that ever happened to me.
I always knew I wanted to be a character in the movies. When I was growing up, I had to have a lot of surgery, and I spent a lot of time recovering at home and in the hospital. Watching movies took me away from my own problems and gave me a total escape.
I know I have within myself... a side of solitude. I think people who know me can see, but people who just meet me can't because I'm generally very fun and gregarious. I love to spend a lot of time on my own. I can seriously go into my own head and often love to let myself travel where I don't know where I'm going. I always felt that that was his kind of form of escape, in a way.
Music has always been a dominant force in my life. As a young kid, it was a way for me to escape everyday life. Today, it's a source of expression. I enjoy looking at old photos of some of my favorite rock icons, but also get inspired from the younger bands that are coming up and really creating their own style, their own image.
I'm not ashamed of comic books. You have some people that are like, 'We're trying to elevate comic books.' Comic books have always told great dramatic stories.
For me, writing something down was the only road out...I hated childhood, and spent it sitting behind a book waiting for adulthood to arrive. When I ran out of books I made up my own. At night, when I couldn't sleep, I made up stories in the dark.
I was always interested in creative writing growing up. From junior high on, I was writing short stories. I also grew up watching movies. My father would take me to everything. Most weeks, I could open the paper having seen every movie listed.
The first two books that I did by myself were long stories in verse. I knew I could do that because I'd written a lot in verse. But, verse stories are hard to sell, so my editor encouraged me to try writing in prose.
Growing up for me in the Philippines was hard to read comic books because I'm blind.
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