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I feel that if I had not had an art program in my school, I would have failed in a big way. My teachers knew I was intelligent, but they didn't quite know how I was ever going to apply that intelligence. The one or two teachers who knew me well knew that it would be through drawing or acting or whatever means of expression I was allowed.

David Small

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David Small
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: February 12
Composer
Illustrator
Writer
Detroit
Michigan
Mean
Whatever
Intelligence
Going
Means
Intelligent
Would
Art
Program
Didn
Expression
Apply
School
Teacher
Failed
Ever
Knew
Teachers
Well
Quite
Allowed
Feel
Acting
Drawing

More quotes by David Small

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I feel sorry for kids nowadays, because in the majority of schools across the country, the arts have been eliminated from the curriculum. There's no art there's no music. In some cases they've taken away the libraries. They don't do theater. And these are the things that speak to the human soul.
David Small
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The odd thing about recurring dreams is that, no matter how many times you dream the same thing, it always takes you by surprise.
David Small
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Leaders of the world, my message to you is simple: to achieve universal peace and understanding on this planet you have only to speak plainly, even though you may look foolish. This is a thousand times better than looking good and talking nonsense.
David Small
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By the time that book So You Want to Be President? came along, we had already had enough presidents that had shown us that presidents are human beings. So I felt I was contributing to the common knowledge there, but not revealing anything really new - sort of supporting what everybody already was suspicious of.
David Small
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Humanization and coming to understand somebody as a human being is about as good a kind of forgiveness as you can get, I think.
David Small
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My friend advised me to go into studying art, which at first shocked me because art was so easy. It was just something I did, like breathing or brushing my teeth. It couldn't be a job. I had a much more difficult time writing plays, making myself sit at that typewriter and finish those things.
David Small
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I do keep up at night. I try not to let my mind go to extremes in the middle of the night because it would be better to turn all that stuff into dreams it would be better if I was sleeping, because dreams become good metaphors for what's really going on inside of you.
David Small
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The whole basis of working in black and white and grays became the basis of my understanding of color, because it's all about tone, it's all about light and dark. If you don't get that, then your color work is going to be a mess. So that's the beginning of the toolkit: drawing and black and white media.
David Small
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.... When you have no voice, you don't exist
David Small
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Even though I have this solid career in picture books, I've not only been thinking about kids - because I don't think that much about children I'm not a child educator I'm just a former child.
David Small
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Art - I had never thought of that as a career because it was like something I did so naturally, and it was fluid, and it is. And even though I still admire literature as the superior art form, I have to admit that art, for me, that's it that's what I'm good at, and that's what I should be concentrating on.
David Small
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You have to get through periods of being blocked. Everybody has them. For me, they have everything to do with self-doubt. It's never a matter of laziness or inability. It's just a matter of believing that what I'm doing is worthwhile, that it matters.I just make myself work. I just make myself go to work, whether I feel like it or not.
David Small
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Teenagers are always sneaking around in drawers where they shouldn't go and reading things they shouldn't be reading. And that's an attempt to try, I think, to penetrate, that's how I found out as a teenager what was going on, was by sneaking into drawers and reading letters that I had no business reading.
David Small
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Writing stories, adopting other characters, making up fantastic stories and tales, this is a way of perhaps enhancing who I am. Writing stories takes a commonplace old life and makes it all somehow more interesting. And hopefully I can do that in a way that touches a lot of people in their lives, too.
David Small
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I think drawing is really the basis of all art, even sculpture, film. The greatest filmmakers have always been able to at least roughly sketch out their ideas in storyboards. And black and white in particular is a good place to start.
David Small
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My interest really is psychology, what's going on in people's minds as revealed on their faces and in their posture. That is my strength. And it's something that came from probably being a silent observer for most of my life and having to read what was going on in people's minds from only their postures or from their expressions.
David Small