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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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Daniel Clowes
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: April 14
Cartoonist
Comics Artist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Dan Clowes
Always
Impetus
Things
Exist
Usually
Create
Imagine
Looking
Must
Thing

More quotes by 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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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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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'm not opposed to comics on the Internet. It's just not interesting to me.
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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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 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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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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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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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 always hiding the books in my closet, and my art's always turned upside down in my drawer.
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
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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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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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But I enjoy the opportunity to use swear symbols.
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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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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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'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