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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.

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
Hard
Draws
Trying
Early
Work
Short
Always
Struggle
Pained
Head
Specific
Fall
Falling
Look
Draw
Looks
Drawing

More quotes by Daniel Clowes

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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
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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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I feel like a lot of my aesthetic was in response to feeling the awfulness and cheapness of that [ the 70'th].
Daniel Clowes
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I really want people to read the book, and bookstores never sold an issue of Eightball because nobody knew what it was.
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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In an art school it's very hard to tell who is the best.
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'm more interested in characters who are a little difficult.
Daniel Clowes
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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
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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
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Avatar is a total nerd thing, and yet our popular culture has somehow made all that stuff acceptable.
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
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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
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But I enjoy the opportunity to use swear symbols.
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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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
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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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I love the medium and I love individual comics, but the business is nothing I would be proud of.
Daniel Clowes
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I'm always hiding the books in my closet, and my art's always turned upside down in my drawer.
Daniel Clowes