35 Quotes by Brian Froud

I live in a house that’s incredibly old, and it’s typical that part of it is slightly in the ground. It’s very earthed. It’s almost like living in a hobbit house.

In college, I became interested in folk tales and fairy tales. Gradually I became more and more interested in the underlying meaning of it all and the possibility of the reality of real fairies.

Art always used to involve spirit. Painters painted spirit. They painted by commission things to go into churches, and that was painting spirit. Or they would paint people of wealth, and they would try to show how they had power, and again, this is sort of spirit.

It was ironic that there I was finally painting the pictures I’d always wanted to paint and feeling very much at home in the countryside, and I ended up working in New York City, which is definitely the archetypal city.

Fairies are becoming much more popular. I see fairyland as this big sea, and the tide is sometimes out.

Naming a fairy is notoriously difficult, because they don’t particularly like to be named. There are so many of them, and humans have always wanted to categorize them. In that way, we think we can have more control over them.

In the 20th century, artists did a great disservice to fairies. They painted fairies in a way that was shallow and trite. So when people see my stuff, they suddenly realize the depth of fairies.

To me, intolerance leads down a dreadful path that the world sometimes seems to be going to.