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For a stretch of time, I got really caught up in the idea that what people liked about my work was that I was a young guy who was trying to be cool by writing about young people and a certain kind of Bay Area culture that I was tangentially a part of.

Adrian Tomine

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Adrian Tomine
Age: 50
Born: 1974
Born: May 31
Cartoonist
Comics Artist
Illustrator
Novelist
Sacramento
California
Work
Guy
Kind
Idea
Really
Culture
Time
Part
Stretch
People
Certain
Area
Young
Liked
Writing
Cool
Trying
Caught

More quotes by Adrian Tomine

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I think most cartoonists are solitary, lonely kids who use their work as a way to try to connect with the world. If I had any other skills that were more performative - if I could have been a musician or an actor - I'm sure I would have pursued that instead in order to get that instant feedback and to hear applause.
Adrian Tomine
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I sense a real difference in my work from the time I was younger and single and more involved in the world of music and going out to bars and all that. There were points at which I was trying to use my art to reflect positively on myself, to almost be flirtatious through the work.
Adrian Tomine
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I do think it's getting more and more rare in this country to raise a kid with the attitude that creativity is something valuable. The idea of trying to make the effort to produce something, to put something out into the world, rather than just taking in all the stuff the world's putting out at you.
Adrian Tomine
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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.
Adrian Tomine
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It's psychologically a weird experience to be so aware of the fact that the real time of your life is moving much faster than the fictional time you're trying to depict. You start to feel very weighted down sometimes.
Adrian Tomine
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It's important to make a distinction between becoming more precise and becoming better.
Adrian Tomine
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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.
Adrian Tomine
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I wanted it to be as readable as possible. I had the ambition of reaching a broader audience.
Adrian Tomine
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For me, as much about being a parent as it is about being a child.
Adrian Tomine
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If something's a little weird, it's Kafkaesque.
Adrian Tomine
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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.
Adrian Tomine
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I'm getting to a point in my life where my whole attitude about the relationship between myself and the audience is totally different.
Adrian Tomine
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The experience of reading a comic should not be the time it takes to turn each page.
Adrian Tomine
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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.
Adrian Tomine
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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.
Adrian Tomine
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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.
Adrian Tomine
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I started publishing my comic while I was still living with my parents.
Adrian Tomine
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I think in terms of getting new artists who are not in that sort of stereotypical teenage boy demographic there's been a lot of progress recently. And I shouldn't make a definitive statement about this, but my impression is that the main impediment to progress in that regard is the number of people who are choosing to make a go of it.
Adrian Tomine
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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.
Adrian Tomine
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And also, as a consumer now, it's weird that when I used to go to a book signing I would leave with a stack of pamphlets people had made to show off their work, and now I just leave with business cards where people have the URL to their websites.
Adrian Tomine