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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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Daniel Clowes
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: April 14
Cartoonist
Comics Artist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Dan Clowes
Direction
Someone
Following
Nothing
Worse
Something
Along
Think
Working
Thinking
Moving
People
Tainted
Stuff
Keeps
Else

More quotes by Daniel Clowes

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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
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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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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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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 like to leave a little room to innovate and change things around while I'm working.
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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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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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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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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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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Avatar is a total nerd thing, and yet our popular culture has somehow made all that stuff acceptable.
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 not opposed to comics on the Internet. It's just not interesting to me.
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 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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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 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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I'm more interested in characters who are a little difficult.
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