Adrian Tomine Quotes

The experience of reading a comic should not be the time it takes to turn each page.

There are certain artists and filmmakers who, I get the impression, are trying to show off how bad their characters can be, how immoral their characters can be.

I think when I finally got it in my head that I was going to do the story, I wanted to avoid doing what I thought people wanted me to do.

A lot of the kinship that people notice is not coincidental. I was very impressionable and trying to find my role models when I was twelve or thirteen.

I was just a guy who did adult or alternative comic books. And then suddenly to be, like, a New Yorker cover artist was a different thing.

Maybe you're not even in a position to really judge how good your kid is at that endeavor.

For me, as much about being a parent as it is about being a child.

I wanted it to be as readable as possible. I had the ambition of reaching a broader audience.

I set myself up for a lot of trouble by wanting to tell a story that is fairly earnest and emotional and expressive, but to do it in the most subtle, realistic way.

It's important to make a distinction between becoming more precise and becoming better.

If something's a little weird, it's Kafkaesque.

There were certainly some people who wanted me to do a feel-good story that affirmed a lot of very commonly held beliefs.

I wanted to try to create characters that happen to be Asian but who are pretty different from those we generally see in our culture, in our commercial culture.

I certainly wasn't consciously hiding my identity in the earlier work, though a lot of people have brought up the fact that I drew myself without eyeballs.

It's cold water in the face to realize you're not nearly as special and as unusual as you might have thought when you were an alienated teenager.

One of the by-products of being allowed to start my professional career prematurely is that the evolution of my work is really evident.

When people see me struggling on paper, I think it invites an almost collaborative relationship with the outside world, and that includes readers and other artists.

I've always been really impressed with some of the longer graphic novels and thought it would be really amazing if one day I could try something like that.

I guess there's just a part of me that's not very enthusiastic about finding myself ten years from now halfway through a story that may or may not be any good.

You start to get nervous when the value of a comic book or graphic novel is relative to the achievements of some other medium.

I wanted all the responsibility to rest on the content of the story. I tried to make the visual style almost invisible.

I think a lot of the criticism had to do with disliking the characters - which, again, I take as something of a compliment.

I think there's a lot of evolution that's happened in intangible ways, in terms of how I think about the work or how I plan it out.

For me, like, the more interesting a letter is I just get more excited and I know that this going to be great for my friends who are looking forward to reading that in my comic.

When email and the Internet came along, I never publish an email address. I just stuck with this P.O. Box address.

I started publishing my comic while I was still living with my parents.

I feel like if people are going to go to the effort to get a stamp and, you know, put it on an envelope that, you know, it's a big effort these days. So I often write back.

If you're changing diapers and going to the playground, any ambitions of being a cool guy have to fly out the window.

I'm getting to a point in my life where my whole attitude about the relationship between myself and the audience is totally different.

I grew up with a very romantic, idealized vision of New York, probably because of all the books I read and the movies I watched.