Quote

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
Anything
Draws
Find
Train
Different
Interested
Thing
Probably
Way
Knew
Time
Least
Trains
World
Interesting
Draw
Stuff
Realized

More quotes by 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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I like to leave a little room to innovate and change things around while I'm working.
Daniel Clowes
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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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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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The secret to being alone is to organize your time to develop habits and routines and gradually elevate their importance to where they seem almost like normal, healthy activities.
Daniel Clowes
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I was a very fearful little kid, and I would always see the worst in everything. The glass was half-empty. I would see people kissing, and I would think one was trying to bite the other.
Daniel Clowes
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I'm not opposed to comics on the Internet. It's just not interesting to me.
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 was thinking the other day that there will never be another form of music that everybody has to respond to - like disco.
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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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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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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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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Before I could read, I remember trying to piece together the stories from the images. It was a very primal experience.
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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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 feel like I understood the language of comics. I had a real fluidity with that medium at a very early age.
Daniel Clowes
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I have this certain vision of the way I want my comics to look this sort of photographic realism, but with a certain abstraction that comics can give. It's kind of a fine line.
Daniel Clowes