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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

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Daniel Clowes
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: April 14
Cartoonist
Comics Artist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Dan Clowes
Years
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Words
Stories
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Comics
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More quotes by Daniel Clowes

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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
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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
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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
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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
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I think I have a very clear vision of what I want things to look like.
Daniel Clowes
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I'm always looking for things I imagine must exist, but don't - this is usually the impetus to create that thing myself.
Daniel Clowes
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Comics seldom move me the way I would be moved by a novel or movie. I say this as someone who would rather read comics than watch movies, listen to music, anything. But it's not an operatic medium. I hear other people talk about being moved to tears by comics. I can't imagine that.
Daniel Clowes
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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
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I lose faith in everything else, but rarely in my work. If I start to get bored, I change it to make it more interesting. I try not to take it too seriously, but I also try to never cheat or hurry things along.
Daniel Clowes
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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
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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
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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
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Even if I only had 10 readers, I'd rather do the book for them than for a million readers online.
Daniel Clowes
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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
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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.
Daniel Clowes
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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
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I think a comic looks better in the magazine. The colors are designed to be on paper, not illuminated on screen. I don't like the aspect of people reading it for free. When people get things for free, they tend to not take them as seriously. But I don't know. I'm sure 10 times more people are reading it online than in the actual paper.
Daniel Clowes
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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
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In an art school it's very hard to tell who is the best.
Daniel Clowes
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That's been my main interest for the last 15 years, is to really make sure the story and the characters take precedence over everything else, and that I give them everything I can to make them exist as actual people.
Daniel Clowes