Daniel Clowes Quotes

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 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 can give some kind of spark of life to a comic that a photograph doesn't really have. A photograph, even if it's connecting with you, it seems very dead on the page sometimes.

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

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

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.

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

I try personally not to be nostalgic.

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

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.

I originally just wanted to be an artist.

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

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.

When I go back and reread the stuff, I'm always floored by how deeply personal and revealing it actually is.

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

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

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

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

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

But I enjoy the opportunity to use swear symbols.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

I've felt that in the past, where I just felt like I had to keep drawing in the same way to maintain this sameness and rhythm throughout an entire book, and it was not really necessary.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

I try to only work on the screenplays for a few hours a day when I'm in my most voluble mood, just sort of writing whatever comes into my head. It's a very freeing thing.

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

It's a challenge to express real life in dramatic terms. In an entirely "made-up" story, you are sometimes overwhelmed by the infinite possibilities.

I'm a fan of parchment and wood pulp.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.