Daniel Clowes famous quotes

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.
-- Daniel Clowes

#Book #Years #Special

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.
-- Daniel Clowes

#Writing #Character #Feelings

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.
-- Daniel Clowes

#Thinking #Artist #Interesting

It's much more liberating as a artist to feel like you can approach each page and each panel with the way that inspires you the most. I think the thing that bogs down a lot of artists is that you're kind of stuck drawing in a style you've developed.
-- Daniel Clowes

#Thinking #Artist #Drawing

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.
-- Daniel Clowes

#Book #Past #Drawing

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.
-- Daniel Clowes

#Book #Artist #Years

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

#Book #Issues #People

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

#Drawing #Effort #Too Much

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

#Littles #Rooms

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."
-- Daniel Clowes

#Beautiful #Weekend #Hands

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

#Feelings #Aesthetic #Feels

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

#Thinking #Vision #Looks

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.
-- Daniel Clowes

#Thinking #Goal #Interesting

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

#Art #Book #Upside Down

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

#Book #Projects #Wells

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

#Stuff #Revealing

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.
-- Daniel Clowes

#School #Kids #Rays

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.
-- Daniel Clowes

#Eye #Research #Periods

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.
-- Daniel Clowes

#Clothes #Design #Eras

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.
-- Daniel Clowes

#Morning #Drawing #Editing

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.
-- Daniel Clowes

#Fall #Mean #Thinking

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!
-- Daniel Clowes

#Laughing #Suffering #Trying

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?
-- Daniel Clowes

#Mean #Men #Trying

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...
-- Daniel Clowes

#Mean #Smoking #Guy

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
-- Daniel Clowes

#Art #Hate #School

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.
-- Daniel Clowes

#Healthy #Secret #Normal

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

#Thinking #Media #Radio

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.
-- Daniel Clowes

#Dream #Spiritual #Believe

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

#Art #School

I try personally not to be nostalgic.
-- Daniel Clowes

#Trying #Nostalgic

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

#Littles #Television #Beats

I never feel there's anything I can't do.
-- Daniel Clowes

#Feels

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

#People #Type #Polite

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

#Book #Thinking #Ships

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.
-- Daniel Clowes

#Kids #Gun #Thinking

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

#Thinking #Disappear

I was 30 before I made a living that was not embarrassing.
-- Daniel Clowes

#Embarrassing #Made

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

#Character #Littles #Difficult

I'm a fan of parchment and wood pulp.
-- Daniel Clowes

#Fans #Woods #Pulp

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

#Interesting #Internet

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.
-- Daniel Clowes

#Running #Able #Whim

I don't read much of anything online.
-- Daniel Clowes

#Online

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

#Book #Envisioning #Process

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.
-- Daniel Clowes

#Kids #Kissing #Thinking

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.
-- Daniel Clowes

#Photography #Giving #Pages

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.
-- Daniel Clowes

#Years #Trying #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.
-- Daniel Clowes

#Giving #Vision #Lines

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.
-- Daniel Clowes

#Book #Mean #Adults

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

#Would Be #Proud #Individual

I originally just wanted to be an artist.
-- Daniel Clowes

#Artist #Wanted

But I enjoy the opportunity to use swear symbols.
-- Daniel Clowes

#Opportunity #Use #Enjoy

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

#Moving #Way #Would Be

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

#Book #Online #Reader

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.
-- Daniel Clowes

#School #Kids #Rays

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.
-- Daniel Clowes

#Morning #Math #Thinking