Quote

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

Daniel Clowes

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Daniel Clowes
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: April 14
Cartoonist
Comics Artist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Dan Clowes
Thinking
Reggae
Lets
Radio
Media
Hear
Everybody
Never

More quotes by Daniel Clowes

Image
It keeps me moving when I see people doing stuff that I see as my direction. I think, Oh, it's been tainted. Now I've got to do something new. There's nothing worse than working on your own stuff and thinking that someone else is following you along.
Daniel Clowes
Image
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
Image
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.
Daniel Clowes
Image
Even if I only had 10 readers, I'd rather do the book for them than for a million readers online.
Daniel Clowes
Image
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
Image
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.
Daniel Clowes
Image
I enjoy the opportunity to use swear symbols. The reader reads into them something worse than what you normally would have. They work as this outburst of incoherent anger. I've found ways to write around swearing that are much more effective, rather than going for what someone really would say.
Daniel Clowes
Image
I like to leave a little room to innovate and change things around while I'm working.
Daniel Clowes
Image
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
Image
If you think about it enough to have a really articulate answer, you're not doing it right. That's how I feel about art. If your thought process could take you to knowing exactly what you're doing and why, there would be no point in making the art. It would become like propaganda. It's more nebulous than that.
Daniel Clowes
Image
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
Image
The greatest moment of my life was, somebody sent me a cable-access show from Chicago that had Joey Ramone on it showing the video we made together. And he was talking about, like, This guy Dan Clowes postponed his wedding for us. He's a great guy.
Daniel Clowes
Image
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
Image
I'm usually the last to see my influence in other people's work. People give me stuff and say Oh look, this guy's ripping you off, and I'm like What do you mean? Often I see the people that I've ripped off filtered into my own work. In other people's work, I can only see specific, tiny little instances of inflections stolen from another ar
Daniel Clowes
Image
Surely comics require more effort on the part of the reader than movies or television. I'm always learning new things you can do with comics that wouldn't work in any other medium, and often they require the need to process a lot of dense information. Of course, the trick is to make the complicated seem effortless and spontaneous.
Daniel Clowes
Image
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
Image
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.
Daniel Clowes
Image
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.
Daniel Clowes
Image
Avatar is a total nerd thing, and yet our popular culture has somehow made all that stuff acceptable.
Daniel Clowes
Image
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.
Daniel Clowes