A Quote by Stephen Jay Gould

Pictures are not incidental frills to a text; they are essences of our distinctive way of knowing.

Stephen Jay Gould

Quote Topics

Distinctive Frills Knowing Our Pictures Text Way

Quote Author

Stephen Jay Gould
American - Scientist
September 10, 1941 - May 20, 2002

The text illustrates the pictures - it provides a connective tissue for me. I usually refine the text last, partly because pictures are harder to do, so it's easier to edit words - I use text as grout in between the tiles of the pictures.

Shaun Tan

Pictures have a lot more power than text. Text is just a bunch of little symbols. You have to actually read it and imagine it, and even that can be censored. With pictures, it's a lot more immediate.

Robert Crumb

Style to me is incidental. The British are very adept at creating it for its own sake, but the best style is incidental. John Coltrane had a style but it was totally incidental to what he was.

Tom Verlaine

The pictures feel as essential to me as the text. I was always interested in including pictures with writing.

Marie Calloway

We have a text before us, an ancient text, a living text, and we try to enter it, not only to decipher it, but to penetrate it, to become part of it, similar to the way every student becomes part of a teacher's texture. That's how I see our [with Frank Moore Cross] two differing approaches.

Hershel Shanks

Text is, in some ways, on the way out, unfortunately. There are dating sites now that are just pictures.

Christian Rudder

I never spent less than two years on the text of one of my picture books, even though each of them is approximately 380 words long. Only when the text is finished ... do I begin the pictures.

Maurice Sendak

General ideas are essences. They are our gods: they round and ennoble the most partial and sordid way of living.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

No one can know truth except the one who obeys truth. You think you know truth. People memorize the Scriptures by the yard, but that is not a guarantee of knowing the truth. Truth is not a text. Truth is in the text, but it takes the text plus the Holy Spirit to bring truth to a human soul.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

With Orff it is text, text, text - the music always subordinate. Not so with me. In 'Magnificat,' the text is important, but in some places I'm writing just music and not caring about text. Sometimes I'm using extremely complicated polyphony where the text is completely buried. So no, I am not another Orff, and I'm not primitive.

Krzysztof Penderecki

If you see everything through the lens, you are constantly composing pictures. I think in pictures; I don't think in text.

Alison Jackson

My goal is to create a book where the entire book-text, pictures, shape of book-work together to create the theme. The placement of images and text on the page is crucial for me.

Chris Raschka

The only things that distinguish the photographer from everybody else are his pictures: they alone are the basis for our special interest in him. If pictures cannot be understood without knowing details of the artist's private life, then that is a reason for faulting them; major art, by definition, can stand independent of its maker.

Robert Adams

In practically every film you experience, you can see the director following the text. Illustrating the words first, making the pictures after, and, alas, so often not making pictures at all, but holding up the camera to do its mimetic worst.

Peter Greenaway

Football was always a deal we made with ourselves. We adopted it for its brutality, which was embedded in a context that happened to be perfectly suited to television and to gambling, but which we could convince ourselves was only incidental to our enjoyment because it was only incidental to the game itself.