Best 90 quotes of Daniel Clowes on MyQuotes

Alfred Hitchcock talked about planning out his movies so meticulously that when he was actually shooting and editing, it was the most boring thing in the world. But drawing comics isn't like shooting a movie. You can shoot a movie in a few days and be done with it, but drawing a comic takes years and years... That's the biggest part of doing comics: You have to create stuff that makes you want to get out of bed every morning and get to work.

All I can say on the Guilford story - and this comes more from my perspective as a father than an artist - is for parents and administrators to give so little value to the career of a public-school teacher - to allow him to be cast aside without exhausting every avenue to resolve the issue - is an obscenity worse than anything I've ever drawn in my comics.

At a certain point, I realized that I could draw anything, and there was nothing I should avoid - I could make it work. That's opened me up to being able to be much more comfortable telling any kind of story.

Avatar is a total nerd thing, and yet our popular culture has somehow made all that stuff acceptable.

Before I could read, I remember trying to piece together the stories from the images. It was a very primal experience.

But I enjoy the opportunity to use swear symbols.

But they always just laugh off everything I say, when really I want absolutely nothing more than to destroy the world they live in and to watch them suffer, alone and miserable, trying to live in my world for a change!

Certainly it's great to be able to talk to your friends about something. They might mention a film, and you can find all about it, and you don't have to wait months until you can find a book that might cover the subject and keep it in your head. You can have that kind of immediacy. But there's also something about it, where all the knowledge seems kind of fleeting. All the stuff I learn about in that way, I can be interested in for a day and then it's gone.

Comics seldom move me the way I would be moved by a novel or movie. I say this as someone who would rather read comics than watch movies, listen to music, anything. But it's not an operatic medium. I hear other people talk about being moved to tears by comics. I can't imagine that.

Even if I only had 10 readers, I'd rather do the book for them than for a million readers online.

Everybody just lets the media do their thinking for them... that's why you'll never hear any reggae on the radio!

Face it, you hate every single boy on the face of the Earth!" "That's not TRUE, I just hate all these obnoxious, extroverted, pseudo-bohemian art-school losers

Film is a director's medium, and a film set is a complicated military structure - I have to keep reminding myself to stay in my place, or all will burst into chaos.

For example, I noticed that every single kid in the high school in 'The Death-Ray' is based on somebody I went to high school with.

For me, the whole process involves envisioning this Ghost World comic book in my head as I'm working.

I actually start drawing things. Usually they're abandoned before I commit too much time and effort.

I believe in the transformative power of cinema. It is only through this shared dream-experience that we can transcend the oppressive minutiae of daily existence and find some spiritual connection in the deeper reality of our mutual desire.

I can look at my early work and see what a pained struggle it was to draw what I was drawing. I was trying so hard to get this specific look that was in my head, and always falling short.

I'd always wanted to do a weekly strip, or a strip that was in installments like that. It's been fun trying to figure out how to make that work. Their standards are so prissy that they won't allow me to use all kinds of language. Not only can you not swear, this morning I was informed I couldn't use the word "schmuck." I couldn't use "crap," "schmuck," or "get laid." Those three were beyond the pale. But you get around that, and it comes out better. I can't quite explain why.

I enjoy the opportunity to use swear symbols. The reader reads into them something worse than what you normally would have. They work as this outburst of incoherent anger. I've found ways to write around swearing that are much more effective, rather than going for what someone really would say.

I feel like a lot of my aesthetic was in response to feeling the awfulness and cheapness of that [ the 70'th].

I feel like I understood the language of comics. I had a real fluidity with that medium at a very early age.

If I could have somehow been the kind of artist who could crank out two or three issues a year, that's different. That's sort of what it's all about, to get this thing out so that there's some kind of continuity. But to do a comic book every year or two was just so anti-climactic.

If you think about it enough to have a really articulate answer, you're not doing it right. That's how I feel about art. If your thought process could take you to knowing exactly what you're doing and why, there would be no point in making the art. It would become like propaganda. It's more nebulous than that.

I had no television when I was little, just a stack of old, beat-up comics from the 1950s and 1960s.

I have a very low tolerance for animation. I'm used to the perfect integrity you get from drawing your own comics. There's something about that that animation always loses.

I have cultivated a little crew of people whose opinions I understand. It's like the way you'd follow certain film critics because you know what their criteria are, and you may not agree with them, but you can glean from their opinion how you will feel about a film.

I have this certain vision of the way I want my comics to look; this sort of photographic realism, but with a certain abstraction that comics can give. It's kind of a fine line.

I just try to make comics for myself, try to give it some kind of unity throughout. That often involves tiny details. I'm never sure what's going to be obvious or what nobody will ever notice. I put stuff in my comics that I thought was blatantly obvious, and nobody noticed. And things that I think are buried in the background, everybody gets it. So I try to be consistently aware of every part of the frame.

I knew how to draw all of the different smokestacks on the old trains and all that stuff, and then I realized that if I can draw trains, which is the thing I was probably the least interested in in the world at the time, I can do anything and find a way into it that will be interesting.

I lose faith in everything else, but rarely in my work. If I start to get bored, I change it to make it more interesting. I try not to take it too seriously, but I also try to never cheat or hurry things along.

I love the medium and I love individual comics, but the business is nothing I would be proud of.

I'm always hiding the books in my closet, and my art's always turned upside down in my drawer.

I'm not opposed to comics on the Internet. It's just not interesting to me.

I must have been 3 years old or less, and I remember paging through these comics, trying to figure out the stories. I couldn't read the words, so I made up my own stories.

In a movie, you have to be mindful that no budget is going to be able to deal with running around the globe at every whim of the writer.

In an art school it's very hard to tell who is the best.

In some ways, I never outgrew my adolescence. I wake up in the morning and think, 'Oh my God, I'm late for a math test!' But then I say, 'Wait a minute. I'm 40.

I really want people to read the book, and bookstores never sold an issue of Eightball because nobody knew what it was.

I see a lot of possibilities in the age of my characters - between 18 and 21. You have a window of opportunity when you leave your childhood behind and have this chance to become what you always wanted to be. For me, that was a time when I could have gone many different ways. I was in flux and deciding what kind of person I would become. There's something interesting about the vision of what that will be and the reality of making that happen, and how you really are what you are. Unless you're "in character," it's impossible to get around that.

I started drawing at a very young age. Writing a story wasn't satisfying, but to actually draw our own world - it's like controlling your own dreams.

I tend to be the type who is overly polite and sort of ingratiating to other people.

I think a comic looks better in the magazine. The colors are designed to be on paper, not illuminated on screen. I don't like the aspect of people reading it for free. When people get things for free, they tend to not take them as seriously. But I don't know. I'm sure 10 times more people are reading it online than in the actual paper.

I think if you had different artists approaching the material in different styles, that's very different. I think it's an interesting thing to discover, what's present in the work even when you're shifting the styles. I've just found it a much stronger way to work.

I think I have a very clear vision of what I want things to look like.

I think I'm gonna attach myself to the sinking ship that is book publishing.

I think I've had the fantasy of a ray-gun that could erase the world from the time I was a very little kid.

I think that gulf is what makes the work interesting, but as a creator it's endlessly frustrating because I'm starting out with this goal, this thing I'm trying to create, and then the thing I actually do create is very, very different. It's always painful, in some ways, especially when it's just finished.

I think that's what we're all most terrified about: that we'll just die and disappear and we'll leave no trace.

I think there was a point that I realized I could do what I wanted to do in terms of the drawing. I used to run around a lot of things. I would shy away from certain things that I realized would be horrible for me to draw, and just wouldn't be fun.