Latest Art Spiegelman Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• On September 11 one of the messages on our answering machine was from The New Yorker saying get down here right away for a special issue we'll be doing. That seemed so irrelevant to me, considering the cataclysm. I went to my studio for a while and I was processing the news. Because when we were in the thick of it, it just felt like Mars Attacks!, Is Paris Burning?, and I had no perspective. For a while, I thought I should go down and look for bodies. At the same time, since The New Yorker was looking for images, I thought, "Well, I'm more trained to look for images than for bodies."

  Art Spiegelman

  Perspective, September 11, Special

  Source: progressive.org

• Sometimes I'm drawing onto a computer directly, sometimes I'm drawing on paper , so I can't really talk about drafts. It's just like having soft clay until it hardens. At least as much of the problem has to do with the decisions of what to represent, how to represent that, and how to reduce it down. The words in the balloons aren't particularly poetic necessarily, but it has the same problem as poetry, which is that one has to do great reduction. And if I tried to draw everything, you'd just have a tangled mess of a picture. The stripping down takes much longer than building up.

  Art Spiegelman

  Tangled, Decision, Computer

  Source: progressive.org

• It's not an accident that, while bookstores are all in a tizzy, one of the more lively and alive sections is the so-called "graphic novel" section, because those are harder to replace.

  Art Spiegelman

  Alive, Bookstores, Graphic Novels

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

• I would say that, in the future, the book will be reserved for things that function best as a book. So, if I need a textbook that's going to be out of date because of new technological inventions, you're better off having it where you can download the supplements or the update. If you're going to read a quick mystery novel to keep you amused while you're traveling, it's fine.

  Art Spiegelman

  Book, Mystery Novels, Updates

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

• When a technology is replaced by another technology, the previous technology either becomes art or it dies.

  Art Spiegelman

  Art, Technology, Dies

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

• Even on the iPad or the Kindle, when reading a book, you're rewarded for pressing a button - it's almost as if it were a Pavlovian thing. There's a little action that happens. And that there's always a little pump of adrenaline that happens. But that pump is different when you're lifting a page as if it was a curtain in a theater to show you another thing.

  Art Spiegelman

  Book, Reading, Ipads

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

• If you're going to visit and re-visit a book, it has more reason to be a real book, because of that ability to concentrate and that relationship that you build up with it, as opposed to the relationship that you build up with your screen, rewards replacement.

  Art Spiegelman

  Real, Book, Rewards

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

• What we're losing culturally the fastest, aside from natural resources and oil and the idea of democracy and social justice, is the ability to concentrate.

  Art Spiegelman

  Ideas, Oil, Justice

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

• I always have been and will remain someone who loves real, 3D, substantial books. And I don't believe that it's a wistful, nostalgic interest like vinyl collectors. It's not the same thing.

  Art Spiegelman

  Real, Book, Believe

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

• The book has very specific qualities. Let's say in 2300 they discover the physical book, after having lived with the digital book for several hundred years. They'll be able to say, "Look at all the cool stuff you can have in a real book and how different it is." The differences are manifold.

  Art Spiegelman

  Real, Book, Years

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

• Right now anything made for the iPad is like performance art. I'm not interested in performance art. Comics are too hard to make to be done for such a passing blip. When it stabilizes, I'll look at it.

  Art Spiegelman

  Art, Ipads, Looks

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

• I think a lot of America turned to art and culture after Sept. 11. I know the sales of bibles went shooting up, but so did the sales of poetry. I think in a crisis one looks to one's culture, partially to give validation to why one would want that culture to survive.

  Art Spiegelman

  Art, Thinking, Validation

  "In the Shadow of No Towers". Interview with Jeff Fleischer, www.motherjones.com. October 18, 2004.

• I live in my own bubble. I was looking for an audience that wouldn't necessarily be looking for escapism when they came to my comics.

  Art Spiegelman

  Escapism, Audience, My Own

  Source: www.esquire.com

• One way of understanding a graphic novel is that it's an ambitious comic and one way or another my comics have had ambitions. I have no problem with escapism. When I get my depressions all I want to do is escape reality.

  Art Spiegelman

  Ambition, Reality, Understanding

  Source: www.esquire.com

• Comics can be pernicious, fascist propaganda or anti-authoritarian. The ones that shaped me were particularly anti-authoritarian.

  Art Spiegelman

  Propaganda, Fascists, Pernicious

  Source: www.esquire.com

• I always had more allergies toward the superhero comics than the others. I thought those were aimed more toward the people who would beat me up.

  Art Spiegelman

  People, Superhero, Allergies

  Source: www.esquire.com

• I became a degenerate artist. My parents were shaped by their own experiences, and artists weren't so useful in the death camps.

  Art Spiegelman

  Artist, Parent, Degenerates

  Source: www.esquire.com

• What's called art now probably has some legitimate things happening in it, but I've become more and more distrustful of a lot of it because it seems like an extension of the fashion trade and the stock market.

  Art Spiegelman

  Fashion, Art, Trade

  Source: www.motherjones.com

• I think as soon as I figured out - and this must have been incredibly young - that comic books were made by humans, rather than being natural phenomenon likes trees or rocks, I just wanted to be one of the people who did that. So I was copying all kinds of cartoons that I was reading, comic books, and eventually learned how to draw cartoon books step-by-step and just, I don't know, I'm not an especially quick learner, but I sure was a dedicated one.

  Art Spiegelman

  Book, Reading, Thinking

  "Art Spiegelman’s Life in the 'Shadow of Maus'". Interview with Eric Wuestewald, www.motherjones.com. January 6, 2014.