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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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Daniel Clowes
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: April 14
Cartoonist
Comics Artist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Dan Clowes
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More quotes by 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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Writing screenplays is very freeing from what you can do in comics in a lot of ways. You can change things around. I can take great delight in writing 40 pages, then just pressing delete and getting rid of it and not thinking about it ever again. Whereas in comics, if I had put that kind of effort into it, I couldn't go on.
Daniel Clowes
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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
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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 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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Everybody just lets the media do their thinking for them... that's why you'll never hear any reggae on the radio!
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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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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But I enjoy the opportunity to use swear symbols.
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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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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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
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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
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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
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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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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'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
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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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I was thinking the other day that there will never be another form of music that everybody has to respond to - like disco.
Daniel Clowes