YouSaid · the spoken record

Quentin Blake

lines on the record: 44
first: 2006-10-01
most recent: 2006-10-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, it's that again is a problem because what I really want is an everlasting supply of arch watercolour paper, but of course I don't regard that as a luxury. It's what we would. It's a necessity. But if you could fix it for me, I would accept that.”
2006-10-01 · Desert Island Discs · Quentin Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know, perhaps It's very difficult collecting poems of Lord Byron, the collected poems of Alexander Pope, or perhaps if there's a big volume with a lot of Dickens in it, that's probably what I would settle.”
2006-10-01 · Desert Island Discs · Quentin Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes but I like going out to talk to friends and editors and complaining and things of that kind, so it might not be so easy, and I shall do my best.”
2006-10-01 · Desert Island Discs · Quentin Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The eighth record comes out of another experience which I had last year when I was asked to put on an exhibition rather like the National Gallery one at the reopening of the Petit Palais Museum in Paris, and I did huge drawings on the wars to introduce nineteenth century paintings and prints of women. And I also did a book of French verse for my French publisher, and one of the poems in it is a poem or song by Georges Brass called Le Parapuy the Umbrella, and it seemed just right I went out of the Petit Palais one day, was lucky enough to get a taxi, got into the taxi, and this was playing on the radio.”
2006-10-01 · Desert Island Discs · Quentin Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do you know I don't know the first book I ever did I tried out in an infant school, and I've never tried them out since, and I mean obviously I think about them and I'm trained as a teacher and I have some sense of the audience but what I thought when I started was I'll do this and if they like it I'll go on doing it”
2006-10-01 · Desert Island Discs · Quentin Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The next one is what is going back to this business of drawing, and this is Vojak's cello concerto. And it's played by Casals, who again. plays it, as I say, as though he was playing it with some wonderfully scratchy implement.”
2006-10-01 · Desert Island Discs · Quentin Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's an artist man called Michael Wilson who at that time was director of exhibitions at the National Gallery. He said we can only have one artist for each letter of the alphabet. So I said, well, there's a bit of a problem about B then. Is it me or Botticelli or Bruegel or something? He said, no, no, you're not in it at all. Oh he said, But there's a lot of room on the wall you could draw on the walls and I said Are you allowed to do that? And he said we want it to look as little like the National Gallery as possible And so I drew between the pictures, and I hoped they introduced you to the pictures rather than put you off.”
2006-10-01 · Desert Island Discs · Quentin Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was important to me before it happened I thought that sounds who's going to take a notice of somebody called a children's laureate, you know, it sounded rather sort of self conscious, but of course once they said we've chosen you, my attitude changed to me. It was a wonderful idea. I suddenly thought it was a wonderful idea. Well, the great thing about it is what that laureate badge meant you could do all kinds of things that I wouldn't have presumed to ask to do. I thought It would be quite nice to have some children's book illustrations in the National Gallery, and so we did a show called Tell me a picture which had children's book illustrations, contemporary paintings, modern paintings, and works of the old masters, and hung them alphabetically, so none was raised above the other, if you see what I mean.”
2006-10-01 · Desert Island Discs · Quentin Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The sixth record is well it comes from that time already a bit before it, and I just thought in relation to the desert island it might be nice to have a hint of memory of the weather back home. So this is Flanders and Swann, who I remember seeing on the stage in the fifties and sixties, and this is very terse and to the point. It's a song of the weather.”
2006-10-01 · Desert Island Discs · Quentin Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think doing it twice which affected what I did was like cooking something twice. You know, I think the flavours got better.”
2006-10-01 · Desert Island Discs · Quentin Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I drew what Rald had written in the text, and he said the BFG, the big friendly giant, he wore big leather apron and boots, you know, some Wellington boots. I drew that. And of course he mentions it. He doesn't mention it again in the book, but I draw it and I draw it in every wretched picture, of course, and after a few of these, I don't like this apron much. It gets in the way, doesn't it? It's to run and jump up and down and that sort of thing. And we went back and redesigned what he was going to wear and thought all that through it. We got it all worked out, but we couldn't do the shoes. And so I went off home and a bit later this very strange kind of brown paper parcel, obviously made by Royal himself, right? And he's got this big sandal in it. And if you look in the book, you can see it. That's what he's wearing.”
2006-10-01 · Desert Island Discs · Quentin Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know whether I laughed at the time. Probably no. I gritted my teeth, I expect. But we did start again. And it's very difficult to talk about it not with hindsight in a way because, you know, Rald made a list of things. These are the things I think we ought to draw on. And that was when I started going down to Great Missing and taking the drawings. And you weren't just sort of a little salad or parsley added to it afterwards with no effect.”
2006-10-01 · Desert Island Discs · Quentin Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, really, I mean the BFG it really worked better in a way because it went wrong slightly and that it's a much longer book and I think everybody except Rald thought that it was going to have a scattering of illustrations, you know, rather different from the two previous ones. And it was actually at the printer's, you know, and I'd done a dozen or so drawings would he approved of the drawings, but he was horrified to discover there were only these. So over the weekend, that weekend, I did chapter heading drawings for twenty three chapters, whatever it is, and delivered them after the weekend, and feeling quite pleased with them I got it done. And the next day they rang up and said he's still not happy and we started again.”
2006-10-01 · Desert Island Discs · Quentin Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think so, yes, I never knew and I never asked, but at that time I had an American agent who said other people had been asked.”
2006-10-01 · Desert Island Discs · Quentin Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Screaming with terror. Yes, yeah. Well, I mean, he said, I think he says in the text that teeth rattled, you know, well, I mean, crocodiles teeth don't, and I thought it was a sort of cross between a punch and Judy crocodile and Richard III sort of thing. Is that kind of embodiment of evil? I mean the book is the guide, the book is always the guide, but it leads you to find things which you mightn't have found otherwise.”
2006-10-01 · Desert Island Discs · Quentin Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well he moved from his previous publisher to Jonathan Cape and the director of Jonathan Cape was Tom Mashler. And I think he'd suggested Duroll that he would write a picture book which he'd never done before, and he wrote the enormous crocodile, and then I was one of the people that suggested to illustrate it.”
2006-10-01 · Desert Island Discs · Quentin Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's fascinating because sometimes people say to you, you know, you must enjoy doing your own work better, but really I like collaborating with people. And what you do first of all is you collaborate with what they've written, so you read it intensely and you read it several times and you try and get the atmosphere of what that is. And then you do some drawings and try and draw what you feel is there and where it should go and which bits you should draw. And really it's after that that you talk to the author, I think. And then that gives them a chance. It's no good saying what shall I draw? You know, I mean, you have to make your commitment to it.”
2006-10-01 · Desert Island Discs · Quentin Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was an element of that, I think this is not a kind of music. I really know anything about, but if I wanted to be reminded of a party at the RCA, I mean any of those parties at the RCA in the late 60s and 70s, this would do it for me. I heard it through the grapevine.”
2006-10-01 · Desert Island Discs · Quentin Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the life you were living. Yes, no, no, it was wonderful in two ways. I mean, Brian Robb, who I'd known at Chelsea, went to the RCA and taught illustration there, and he said to me You wouldn't like a part time job here, would you? And I thought about that for about five seconds and said yes without knowing what I Was saying yes to. Actually, I thought it was be a very part time job, you know, a sort of humble railway you crept in once or twice a week, but in fact of course the department had thirty students, but it only had three tutors, and so I became a pillar of that department immediately. And a lot of my friends are, you know, were students at the ex-students. I mean, they were postgraduate students, you know, and I was 30-something, they were 20-something. So the distance wasn't huge, and I still know lots of them.”
2006-10-01 · Desert Island Discs · Quentin Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's right. I didn't like it very much. I mean, I didn't like it because I liked them, if you see what I mean, so it was harder to rebel. But eventually I went and lived in a flat in London, and the work built up, you know.”
2006-10-01 · Desert Island Discs · Quentin Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Next piece of music is one of the sea interludes from Benjamin Britton's Peter Grimes, and I like it because it's got that sense of flatness and water that I associate with the marshes that I spend a lot of my time in.”
2006-10-01 · Desert Island Discs · Quentin Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. I think everybody is, but I think I am to some extent. I mean, I think there are instincts that direct you, and there was one that took me to Chelsea Art School, which was the next stage, because I'd read about a man called Brian Rob, who was both a painter and a cartoonist and an illustrator, and I was looking for somewhere where I could go and do life drawing because I knew that I just didn't know enough to draw the things I wanted to draw, and I discovered he was teaching at Chelsea, and I went there, and that I got myself there in retrospect, is a kind of miracle because I mean he actually changed the rest of my life.”
2006-10-01 · Desert Island Discs · Quentin Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was, yeah, I think it was, actually. I'm not well defined, but I think it was growing there. I mean, it was rather funny when I turned down the job. And then, of course, as one does, I got cold feet the next day and rang up and said, oh, what happens if I change my mind? They said, we've appointed somebody else. But I mean, it was a relief, really. But it's very strange how you come to do right things sometimes because I was actually right not to take that job, you know, because I didn't want to become that kind of art director. I wanted to be an artist in my own right, really, I think.”
2006-10-01 · Desert Island Discs · Quentin Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I turned it down. Why on earth did you turn it down? Well, I think I already thought that punch wasn't there. Where I was going, really I was getting out of jokes, and I wanted to get I mean somewhere in me I wanted to be a book illustrator, you know, kind of thing. Was that defined in your?”
2006-10-01 · Desert Island Discs · Quentin Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I really wanted to do it. I mean, I'm passionate about it, actually. I went on to do a teaching year at London University School of Education. In fact, curious enough, while I was doing that year, I was offered a job, and Assistant art director on punch.”
2006-10-01 · Desert Island Discs · Quentin Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it was I mean it was very valuable to him and I liked it. I started going to life classes at the art school. I art edited one to issues of grantor, which in those days was the student magazine, but I didn't quite feel I was part of that. entirely it may be that there were a lot of public school boys there and I was a grammar school boy or maybe I didn't quite make that transition and in a sense I suppose when I came to teach at the Royal College of Art later on I was more I caught up on some of the as it were student life that I'd rather neglected when I was at Cambridge”
2006-10-01 · Desert Island Discs · Quentin Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I started having a good time in one way because I was reading a lot of books, but I wasn't it was curious, I think I was rather we were at a rather serious college, at least I felt one ought to be serious, and so I didn't do a lot of things by way of parties and theatricals and things of that kind. I think I would probably be regarded as a bit of a disappointment as a student in that department. So that”
2006-10-01 · Desert Island Discs · Quentin Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The next piece of music is really a bit to do with Cambridge. When I got to Cambridge, I started to learn a bit more about music, and this is a song by John Dowland In Darkness Let Me Dwell, and it seems for me it will, as I'm listening to it, it gathers up both a sense of reading Shakespeare, of being at Cambridge, of encountering new kinds of music, and so it takes me back to that time, as well as being, I think, very good to listen to now as well.”
2006-10-01 · Desert Island Discs · Quentin Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that, oh no, they were pleased about that. I don't think they had quite the sense of what it meant, really, I think, you know. I mean, I think they were pleased for me. And, of course, having passed through the thirties, which was a difficult time for employment, I mean, they were anxious that my brother and I should have reliable jobs, you would think of that as being in the civil service or in a bank or something like that, or being a teacher, and in fact it was a teacher that I went through with that experience.”
2006-10-01 · Desert Island Discs · Quentin Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're quite right, though. Very few people at that time did go to Oxford or Cambridge from our school or indeed from any schools except private schools. And you were the first.”
2006-10-01 · Desert Island Discs · Quentin Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You might do they were quite economical, but you might recognise them, but it's that way of drawing which I now know people recognise happened really when I was twenty something, and gradually I relaxed, and in fact, if you're relaxed, you draw much better because you are thinking about what that is, what that gesture is that that person is making, you're not thinking about am I going to spoil it which is the important thing, I think.”
2006-10-01 · Desert Island Discs · Quentin Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I actually sent drawings for two years before anything was accepted, and at the end I wrote rather pathetically, saying I've been sending these drawings in for two years could I bring some in? And in fact, I did go to punch office, which was very grand in those days. It was like a London men's club, you know, with traps in suits, and I sat in the waiting room, and the secretary gave me some copies of the New Yorker, I think, or something like that, and I was sitting there reading those next to a woman who eventually disappeared. And then she came back after about half an hour and said, Oh, are you still here? We thought you were with that lady, and I had to go back another day but they were very nice to me, and that's when they took two of these little drawings.”
2006-10-01 · Desert Island Discs · Quentin Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was terribly important for me. I can still remember getting that letter standing at the bottom of the stairs, you know where the letters arrived, kind of thing. They were terrible drawings, really. I mean, you know, I could draw well enough to get the joke across, to get it into the paper, and they were very small drawings, but that got me started.”
2006-10-01 · Desert Island Discs · Quentin Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've well, actually not. There was somebody else, actually the 19th century who was Dickie Doyle, who was a man I may have admired. How was he? He was 16 as well, I think. But no, probably somewhere I've still got the letter from the art editor, which in handwriting at the bottom says, congratulations to the youngest contributor.”
2006-10-01 · Desert Island Discs · Quentin Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The second piece of music is part of Ravel's piano concerto, not the one for the left hand, the one in G major, but it's got that sort of wonderful spirit of poison vivacity and energy which I admire in a lot of French music.”
2006-10-01 · Desert Island Discs · Quentin Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I was quite right. I mean, I could do the other exams. But, I mean, what I wanted to do was be let alone to draw something and get on with drawing something. I remember there was an art master there who obviously had to get people to draw who didn't like drawing and he got you to do wild wandering lines, you know, and then you had to look at it and see what you and I could only make octopuses out of it. But in the sixth form I was taught by a man called Stanley Simmons, who was a real painter and has only just died recently, and he really talked to you like a serious artist and told you what you had done. And that was where I began to get some sort of basis.”
2006-10-01 · Desert Island Discs · Quentin Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, traditionally they did because it wasn't the sort of school where you did art very much. You were allowed to do it. I mean, there's a great tradition of that, but chaps who are not very bright are allowed to do art or woodwork sort of thing. But you were aware of it.”
2006-10-01 · Desert Island Discs · Quentin Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You start collecting shrapnel. You sort of carry on. I mean, there is an air raid shelter in the garden, and I think I can once remember seeing bombs dropping out of an aeroplane, and I can remember being at a party strangely a birthday party or something like that where you could see the red glow of the fires in East London which was the blitz.”
2006-10-01 · Desert Island Discs · Quentin Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I don't think so. I mean, we did have a visitor to the house and I learnt about this afterwards and somebody wrote a letter to someone in the family saying you're going to see Quentin he doesn't talk very much but he draws a lot.”
2006-10-01 · Desert Island Discs · Quentin Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm a sort of musical illiterate, so I'm one of these people who only knows what I like, but this is a piece of Yanach's quartet intimate letters, which is I when I discovered Yana Jack, I suppose it was when I was a student, I thought it was wonderful because it sounds like what drawing feels like.”
2006-10-01 · Desert Island Discs · Quentin Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Noah, this is vicarious. I mean, this is instead, you know, I mean, the pictures of all of the people running about and jumping and dancing, something I do very badly indeed, if I ever do it. And no, I can imagine those things happening, and I actually kind of mime them when I'm drawing them, and I know, I mean, I've been told I make the faces of the people in the pictures, but it's not what I actually do in life. I can do it in drawings, but I don't expect me to be doing anything too energetic.”
2006-10-01 · Desert Island Discs · Quentin Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I suppose so, I mean with hindsight. I mean, when I was a small boy, I just used to draw'cause I like doing funny drawings, you know, and I didn't think that it was drawing or drawing was a special activity, and then it was later on that I realised that what I really liked was drawing. I mean, jokes were fine, you know kind of thing, but what I really liked was drawing the things in the pictures.”
2006-10-01 · Desert Island Discs · Quentin Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh no, that's absolutely true. Yes, no, I'd forgotten about that. It's before I knew about quills. It was the first punch cover that I ever did, but that was before I discovered the joys of real quills from real birds.”
2006-10-01 · Desert Island Discs · Quentin Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's mostly a pen I use, I use an assortment of things. What I like best is a scratchy pen. It's an old fashioned writing pen and it's called a waverly nib, and you can feel it when you're drawing. You can feel the shapes that you're making. That's what I mostly use, but I mean, as I get older and do it more often, I sometimes use read pens or I use a quill. A few years ago I was given a vulture's wing feather and I thought this would make a marvellous quill so I cut it and drew vultures with it and since then I've been getting parrots feathers to draw parrots with and swans feathers to draw swans with but they're wonderfully scratchy things and the fact that they're a little bit unreliable and you're not quite sure what they're going to do that makes it more exciting. You've got to be on your toes.”
2006-10-01 · Desert Island Discs · Quentin Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source