Parenting & Family Quote by Dick Bruna

What reads like a casual origin story is really a manifesto for control and clarity. Dick Bruna isn’t describing an inspiration so much as a decision: to fuse word and image so completely that neither has to apologize for the other. “Wonderful” does a lot of work here. It’s the modest adjective of someone refusing the grandeur of “art” while quietly claiming a total art form - the page as a single, designed experience.

The intent is practical and almost stubborn. Bruna didn’t want text illustrated after the fact, or drawings “explained” by prose. He wanted meaning built in tandem, where a line of language carries the same graphic discipline as a line of ink. That’s the subtext behind “my text and my drawings together”: authorship as unity, not collaboration. In children’s books, this matters. Kids read pictures before they read sentences; Bruna’s approach respects that hierarchy without preaching about it.

Context sharpens the stakes. Working in mid-century Europe, Bruna was steeped in modernist reduction - the belief that simplification can be an ethical choice, not just a style. His famous economy of form (clean contours, flat color, expressive restraint) isn’t “cute”; it’s designed to be legible, repeatable, and emotionally direct. The quote’s quiet timeline - “Then one day” - masks a larger cultural shift: children’s publishing becoming a serious design arena, where visual language shapes early cognition. Bruna frames the turn as personal whim, but it lands as a claim that children deserve integrated storytelling, not watered-down leftovers from adult art.