Daniel Clowes Quotes

Dear Josh, we stopped by to fuck you but you didn't answer the door. Therefore you are gay.
Sincerely, Tiffany and Amber.

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

Superman's always chasing after someone who just mugged somebody, and I've never seen that happen in my life.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Try letting a Kindle protect your heart from sniper fire!

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

I was 30 before I made a living that was not embarrassing.

Please allow me the honour of allowing you to bestow upon me a blowjob.

I will be the biggest, richest, most popular writer in history. You just watch, dead reader. I'll be the biggest whore ever!

So what have you guys been up to?"
"Nothing, worshipping Satan.

Maybe what I really wanted, I began to think, was a stronger sense of fellowship ... I thought about my friends and about how I didn't have any ...

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

I don't read much of anything online.

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 was thinking the other day that there will never be another form of music that everybody has to respond to - like disco.

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

You try to make the world a better place and what does it get you? I mean, Christ, how the hell does one man stand a chance against four billion assholes?

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

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

That's been my main interest for the last 15 years, is to really make sure the story and the characters take precedence over everything else, and that I give them everything I can to make them exist as actual people.

Bring me your Nortons, your Kramdens, your housewives, and sewermen.
Weight my limbs with the nests of your flotsam, that we may chirp in chorus this melancholy anthem.
Mourn with your busdriver piety this sapless husk;
dull with your tender hymn the string of the lumberman's axe.

When you see somebody who's got a complaining personality, it usually means that they had some vision of what things could be, and they're constantly disappointed by that. I think that would be the camp that I would fall into - constantly horrified by the things people do.

- ... before I was going to college, my secret plan was to one day not tell anybody and just get on some bus to some random city and just move there and become this totally different person.
- Then what?
- ... and not come back until I had totally become this person ... I used to think about it all the time ...
- I don't get it ...
- That's because you don't uterlly loathe yourself

People seem to need a likable protagonist more than ever.

My feeling is that it's one of the very few things that comics can do that you really can't do in any other medium. I feel like the reader accepts all of these styles, and after a certain point you can flip the pages and see a character rendered very differently than you saw on an earlier page, and it's not jarring. It suggests things that you can't suggest just in the writing or in the plotting.

That'll be my claim to fame: My grandmother-in-law is the oldest iPad user!

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

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

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

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

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

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.

For a moment, all movement ceases and the scene is one of crystalline stillness, silent except for a slow, melodramatic heartbeat.

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.

It's embarrassing to be involved in the same business as the mainstream comic thing. It's still very embarrassing to tell other adults that I draw comic books - their instant, preconceived notions of what that means.

I like to leave a little room to innovate and change things around while I'm working.

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 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'm more interested in characters who are a little difficult.

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 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.

But I enjoy the opportunity to use swear symbols.

I try personally not to be nostalgic.

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.

It was one of those rare moments where life delivers on the promises offered by Hollywood ... I just stood there and watched her disappear like the pathetic, 'romantic' coward I was (and still am, I guess) ... In a way, it was a perfect moment
everything I had been waiting for ... People like me probably don't want anything to actually happen to them anyway ...

Maybe I'm just sick of putting more into this friendship than I get out of it.

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.

God, it drives me crazy when I know exactly what I want and I can't find it anywhere! It's like does anybody want my money!? I mean what the fuck!?

Usually when I put together a book like this Death-Ray hardcover or that Ghost World special edition, then I have to reread it and see if there is anything I want to change or any re-coloring I want to do. That's when I'm faced with the actual work. When I'm working, I'm too close to it. I'm sort of inside, and I can't see it at all. So when I have that experience of rereading it years later, it's jarring.

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.

Working on movies made me realize how fluid the medium of film was.

As soon as I'm finished with it, it feels like an impersonal project. Like, "Well, I did another book."

When people get things for free, they tend to not take them as seriously.

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.

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.

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

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.