Escher and animation

I like to keep a page-a-day calendar on my desk at work, and this year I decided to get one containing the art of M.C. Escher. In addition to daily samples of his drawings and woodcuts and such, the weekend pages feature quotes from Escher, several of which hit home to me from an animation standpoint...

"The flat shape irritates me -- I feel like telling my objects, you are too fictitious, lying there next to each other static and frozen; do something, come off the paper and show me what you are capable of! So I make them come out of the plane."

"When, upon completion of high school, I became a student of the Haarlem School for Architecture and Decorative Arts, I came within a hairsbreadth of having the opportunity to become a useful member of society. . . . But the school also offered a course in graphic arts."

"There is indeed a great satisfaction in acquiring skill, in coming to thoroughly understand the qualities of the material at hand and in learning to use the instruments we have -- in the first place, our hands! -- in an effective and controlled way."

"That remarkable urge to obtain multiple images, for which I have no rational explanation, probably goes back to a primeval instinct. It has something to do with "Go forth and multiply..."

"The graphic artist's immaterial and purely spiritual ideal is the fruitful transfer of thoughts from one human being to as many fellow human beings as possible."

Wonderful stuff! I'll share more later as I come across them.