Daniel Clowes Quotes

I think politics has an influence on my work now, perhaps more so than when I was a childless young man, but I hope never to deal with these kinds of issues in anything more than a covert manner. I'm more interested in figuring out what I think than in pronouncing my views to the world.

More and more, I tried to make comics in the way I like to read comics, and I found that when I read comics that are really densely packed with text, it may be rewarding when I finally do sit down and read it, but it never is going to be the first I'm going to read, and I never am fully excited to just sit down and read that comic.

The greatest moment of my life was, somebody sent me a cable-access show from Chicago that had Joey Ramone on it showing the video we made together. And he was talking about, like, "This guy Dan Clowes postponed his wedding for us. He's a great guy."

There are certain things in there that no one else would recognize, really. I see details of my life that I didn't even intend to put in when I was doing the work. 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.

One of my weekend hobbies is to go look at old houses when there are open houses around here. Just to go look at the architecture. And you can see how many houses were built around 1977, the year where everyone said, "Let's put in these aluminum windows instead of beautiful hand-made wood ones."

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

The secret to being alone is to organize your time; to develop habits and routines and gradually elevate their importance to where they seem almost like normal, healthy activities.

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.

I try to employ a different strategy for each story. Often, I'll have a specific look in mind before I even have the story to go with it. I'm not so much interested in forcing the issue of reader identification through various graphic tricks. I'm more interested in creating specific characters that resonate with my own particular inner struggles.

I've had a real lucky time working in Hollywood. I've talked to other screenwriters, and they're all kind of beaten down and their spirits are crushed, because they work on these screenplays and these projects, and then directors either take them and change everything, rewrite them and make them worse, or they film them and they're nothing like how they imagined it to be.

I never know if a book is crazy or not. There's that fear - this is the one that will end it all.

I was a very fearful little kid, and I would always see the worst in everything. The glass was half-empty. I would see people kissing, and I would think one was trying to bite the other.

You need to be, like, turning down high-paying illustration work because you want to work on your comic. That's when you know you're doing something good.

I'm always looking for things I imagine must exist, but don't - this is usually the impetus to create that thing myself.

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.

But I enjoy the opportunity to use swear symbols.

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

Though to the average person that you'll meet on an airplane, if you tell them you draw comics, they'll still have sort of the same response - not like that's seeped into the culture at large, that comics are not just for kids.

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.

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!

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.

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

I never feel there's anything I can't do with comics. There are certain things in comics that you can't do in any other medium: for instance, in Mister Wonderful, Marshall's narration overlaps the events as they're going on. That would be difficult in film; you could blot speech out with a voiceover, but it wouldn't have the same effect. That's always of interest, to see what new things you can do in comics form.

The trouble is the kind of guy I want to go out with doesn't even exist... Like a rugged, chain-smoking, intellectual, adventurer guy who's really serious, but also really funny and mean.

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 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.

There are certain comics that just seem like they have this perfect balance between dialogue and image that I can't not read. I'll want to save it for later, and the next thing I know, I'm reading it. That's what I'm kind of trying to do with my comics.

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

Comics seldom move me the way I would be moved by a novel or movie.

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

Often I'll do research just to get a time period correct, but I didn't have to for the '70s... I feel like I can close my eyes and still see it so clearly.

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'm a fan of parchment and wood pulp.

I'm usually the last to see my influence in other people's work. People give me stuff and say "Oh look, this guy's ripping you off," and I'm like "What do you mean?" Often I see the people that I've ripped off filtered into my own work. In other people's work, I can only see specific, tiny little instances of inflections stolen from another artist.

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.

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

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.

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 never feel there's anything I can't do.

Writing a screenplay, I'm like, "All I'm responsible for is that final script, and I take great effort and pride in that." But once I give it to someone to make, I can disassociate with it entirely and not worry that my vision isn't being represented, because I understand fully that that's not how it works.

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 try personally not to be nostalgic.

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

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

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.

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

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

Something I always wanted to do, to capture that later half of the '70s. It's like the early half of the '70s is still the '60s, in that there's still kind of a playfulness and inventiveness in terms of design and the things that were going on in the culture. The second half, it got much more commodified. It's possibly the ugliest era of architecture and clothes and design in the entire 20th century, from 1975 to '81 or '82.