Latest Daniel Clowes Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• I never know if a book is crazy or not. There's that fear - this is the one that will end it all.

  Daniel Clowes

  Crazy, Book

• I lose faith in everything else, but rarely in my work. If I start to get bored, I change it to make it more interesting. I try not to take it too seriously, but I also try to never cheat or hurry things along.

  Daniel Clowes

  Interesting, Bored, Trying

  "Interviews: On Cartooning". "POV", www.pbs.org.

• I think politics has an influence on my work now, perhaps more so than when I was a childless young man, but I hope never to deal with these kinds of issues in anything more than a covert manner. I'm more interested in figuring out what I think than in pronouncing my views to the world.

  Daniel Clowes

  Men, Thinking, World

  "Interviews: On Cartooning". "POV", www.pbs.org.

• 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

  Real, Challenges, Overwhelmed

  "Interviews: On Cartooning". "POV", www.pbs.org.

• 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

  Effort, Complicated, Spontaneous

  "Interviews: On Cartooning". "POV", www.pbs.org.

• 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

  Imagine

• Film is a director's medium, and a film set is a complicated military structure - I have to keep reminding myself to stay in my place, or all will burst into chaos.

  Daniel Clowes

  Military, Chaos, Film

• I try to employ a different strategy for each story. Often, I'll have a specific look in mind before I even have the story to go with it. I'm not so much interested in forcing the issue of reader identification through various graphic tricks. I'm more interested in creating specific characters that resonate with my own particular inner struggles.

  Daniel Clowes

  Struggle, Character, Mind

  "Interviews: On Cartooning". "POV", www.pbs.org.

• All I can say on the Guilford story - and this comes more from my perspective as a father than an artist - is for parents and administrators to give so little value to the career of a public-school teacher - to allow him to be cast aside without exhausting every avenue to resolve the issue - is an obscenity worse than anything I've ever drawn in my comics.

  Daniel Clowes

  Teacher, Father, Artist

  Source: www.avclub.com

• You have to find the tone of the piece and modulate that. There are ways to indicate that - I try to incorporate the biggest range I can within the story, going from humorous to serious without it being jarring. That's the hardest part, to keep that balance. It requires being constantly aware of where you are in the story. You can't really do that in a movie: You can't slightly modulate the tone by the way the character's eyeballs look in one certain scene.

  Daniel Clowes

  Humorous, Balance, Trying

  Source: www.avclub.com

• 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

  Art, Thinking, Propaganda

  Source: www.avclub.com

• I have a very low tolerance for animation. I'm used to the perfect integrity you get from drawing your own comics. There's something about that that animation always loses.

  Daniel Clowes

  Integrity, Perfect, Tolerance

  Source: www.avclub.com

• 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

  Guy, Together, Moments

  Source: www.avclub.com

• 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 artist.

  Daniel Clowes

  Mean, Artist, People

  Source: www.avclub.com

• 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

  Moving, Thinking, People

  Source: www.avclub.com

• 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

  Moving, People, Tears

  Source: www.avclub.com

• I just try to make comics for myself, try to give it some kind of unity throughout. That often involves tiny details. I'm never sure what's going to be obvious or what nobody will ever notice. I put stuff in my comics that I thought was blatantly obvious, and nobody noticed. And things that I think are buried in the background, everybody gets it. So I try to be consistently aware of every part of the frame.

  Daniel Clowes

  Thinking, Giving, Unity

  Source: www.avclub.com

• I never feel there's anything I can't do with comics. There are certain things in comics that you can't do in any other medium: for instance, in Mister Wonderful, Marshall's narration overlaps the events as they're going on. That would be difficult in film; you could blot speech out with a voiceover, but it wouldn't have the same effect. That's always of interest, to see what new things you can do in comics form.

  Daniel Clowes

  Wonderful, Film, Difficult

  Source: www.avclub.com

• I see a lot of possibilities in the age of my characters - between 18 and 21. You have a window of opportunity when you leave your childhood behind and have this chance to become what you always wanted to be. For me, that was a time when I could have gone many different ways. I was in flux and deciding what kind of person I would become. There's something interesting about the vision of what that will be and the reality of making that happen, and how you really are what you are. Unless you're "in character," it's impossible to get around that.

  Daniel Clowes

  Character, Opportunity, Reality

  Source: www.avclub.com

• 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

  Reading, Thinking, People

  Source: www.avclub.com

• It's hard to tell if anyone's interested in reading a serialized story. But it's interesting to put in a cliffhanger each week. That was popular in old comic strips. They'd write a weekend story different from the daily strip. So people follow one story day to day, and a separate story on weekends. If you read them, you think "I'll read two more." Then you're like "I gotta find out!" And you read 500 more.

  Daniel Clowes

  Reading, Writing, Weekend

  Source: www.avclub.com

• I'd always wanted to do a weekly strip, or a strip that was in installments like that. It's been fun trying to figure out how to make that work. Their standards are so prissy that they won't allow me to use all kinds of language. Not only can you not swear, this morning I was informed I couldn't use the word "schmuck." I couldn't use "crap," "schmuck," or "get laid." Those three were beyond the pale. But you get around that, and it comes out better. I can't quite explain why.

  Daniel Clowes

  Morning, Fun, Trying

  Source: www.avclub.com

• 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

  Writing, Opportunity, Enjoy

  Source: www.avclub.com

• I used to use cigarettes to indicate somebody's an outsider a lot. It gave character a seedy, disreputable, almost suicidal quality. Now cigarettes are so unused - - you can't have anybody indoors smoking. If you drew that in a restaurant, you'd have to have a panel where the manager comes over and kicks them out. Unless it's set in Europe, you can't really do that. Characters who smoke - - it dates comics, somehow.

  Daniel Clowes

  Suicidal, Character, Smoking

  Source: www.avclub.com

• 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

  Writing, Trying, Hours

  Interview with Keith Phipps, www.avclub.com. March 30, 2012.