Chris Ware Quotes

Quotes about:

• There is absolutely no single aspect of one's personality that is more important to develop than empathy, which is not a skill at which men typically are asked to excel. I believe empathy is not only the core of art, literature and music, but should also be at the core of society, from ethics to economics.

  Chris Ware

  Art, Believe, Men

  46 Copy quote

• I don't think of myself as an illustrator. I think of myself as a cartoonist. I write the story with pictures - I don't illustrate the story with the pictures.

  Chris Ware

  Writing, Thinking, Stories

  14 Copy quote

• A book sometimes seems to impose a through-line to life that real life doesn't actually have.

  Chris Ware

  Real, Book, Lines

  8 Copy quote

• Comics are not a genre, but a developing language.

  Chris Ware

  Language

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

  4 Copy quote

• Comic strip is almost like music on a page that you perform in your mind. It's not just pictures. There's a particular rhythm and structure to it that is unlike anything else. It literally is like music. You hear it in your mind as you read it.

  Chris Ware

  Mind, Pages, Comic

  4 Copy quote

• One of the most valuable things one of my art teachers said to me was, ‘Don’t get upset by criticism. Value the fact that at least someone noticed what you did.

  Chris Ware

  Teacher, Art, Upset

  8 Copy quote

• Unlike prose writing, the strange process of writing with pictures encourages associations and recollections to accumulate literally in front of your eyes; people, places, and events appear out of nowhere. Doors open into rooms remembered from childhood, faces form into dead relatives, and distant loves appear, almost magically, on the page- all deceptively manageable, visceral, the combinations sometimes even revelatory.

  Chris Ware

  Love, Writing, Eye

  7 Copy quote

• The "essence" of comics is fundamentally the weird process of reading pictures, not just looking at them. I see the black outlines of cartoons as visual approximations of the way we remember general ideas, and I try to use naturalistic color underneath them to simultaneously suggest a perceptual experience, which I think is more or less the way we actually experience the world as adults; we don't really "see" anymore after a certain age, we spend our time naming and categorizing and identifying and figuring how everything all fits together.

  Chris Ware

  Reading, Thinking, Black

  4 Copy quote

• There is something about the medium [in comics] that allows for a simulation of actual experience with the added benefit of actually reading. You're reading pictures, but you are also looking at them. It's a sort of combined activity that I can't really think of any other medium having, other than, say, a foreign film when you are reading and seeing. It allows for all sorts of associations that might not come up with just words or just pictures.

  Chris Ware

  Reading, Thinking, Benefits

  7 Copy quote

• The thing I don't understand is why so often one hears discussion of the fruits of human labor as if it's all the creation of some alien race.

  Chris Ware

  Race, Fruit, Aliens

  Interview with Keith Phipps, www.avclub.com. May 2, 2001.

  11 Copy quote

• The modern world seems to make fun of people in a lot of ways.

  Chris Ware

  Fun, People, World

  Source: content.time.com

  8 Copy quote

• I'm only trying to present as honest a portrayal of the grimness of human ambition as I can. I'd hope it's rather uplifting, actually, since I find the sort of blind optimism and empty laughter of a great deal of "contemporary culture" to be more depressing than something that admits to a potential for disappointment and a gnawing sense of existential mockery.

  Chris Ware

  Uplifting, Depressing, Disappointment

  Source: www.avclub.com

  4 Copy quote

• I believe that the development of language - of naming, categorization, conceptualization - destroys our ability to see as we age.

  Chris Ware

  Believe, Age, Development

  7 Copy quote

• A comic is a way of literally experiencing someone else's vision with a purity that I don't think any other medium offers; there are no technical, electronic or financial limitations; one only has to work harder to improve. Lately I think a new attitude has prevailed that comics aren't inherently an Art form, but that some cartoonists are genuinely artists.

  Chris Ware

  Art, Attitude, Hard Work

  4 Copy quote

• My head looks like an uncooked ham with glasses.

  Chris Ware

  Glasses, Looks, Ham

  Interview with Rosanna Greenstreet, www.theguardian.com. October 12, 2012.

  4 Copy quote

• Drawing the kind of comics that I do takes so long that to specifically address something as transitory as a political matter in it would be about as effective as composing a symphony with hopes that it would depose a despot. On top of that, I personally don't think that my version of art is the best way to deal with political issues at all, or, more specifically, the place to make a point. Not that art can't, but it's the rare art that still creates something lasting if its main aim was purely to change a particular unfair social structure.

  Chris Ware

  Art, Thinking, Long

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

  4 Copy quote

• I guess we all make choices as to how we want to live, right?

  Chris Ware

  Choices, Want

  4 Copy quote

• Comics, at least in periodical form, exist almost entirely free of any pretense; the critical world of art hardly touches them, and they're 100% personal.

  Chris Ware

  Art, World, Transformation

  7 Copy quote

• I don't think there's any independent cartoonist whose stuff I don't like or respect in at least some way or another. We're all marginal laborers - we're practically medical oddities - so I don't see why we can't all be nice to each other.

  Chris Ware

  Respect, Nice, Independent

  Interview with Keith Phipps, www.avclub.com. December 31, 2003.

  24 Copy quote

• I lose faith every time I have to start a new page, and this is no joke. I've occasionally been criticized over the past couple of years for publicly "complaining" about how difficult drawing comics is, yet I've only mentioned it so that the younger cartoonists who are trying it out and finding it difficult and painful realize that they're not alone. There's not really any set way of learning how to do this, and it's always a struggle to improve, and, more importantly, see accurately whether or not one's work is communicating any shred of feeling or truth at all.

  Chris Ware

  Couple, Struggle, Past

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

  4 Copy quote

• Comics is different than writing because when you draw something you are trying to visualize it and you are trying to put yourself in that space. And when you're drawing something, all sorts of associations come up in my mind that I never would have thought of otherwise.

  Chris Ware

  Writing, Drawing, Space

  4 Copy quote

• Lately, I cant shake the feeling that Ive been living a dream for the last 10 years or so; I cant account for most of my 20s, and I have to continually remind myself that certain people are dead now and many of my friends have children.

  Chris Ware

  Friends, Dream, Children

  7 Copy quote

• Even the disappointing diffusion of a sheer curtain can suggest the most colorful bouquet of unspeakable secrets.

  Chris Ware

  Secret, Bouquets, Disappointing

  8 Copy quote

• As children, as we learn what things are, we are slowly learning to dismiss them visually. As adults, entirely submerged in words and concepts, we spend almost all of our time thinking and worrying about the past and the future, hardly ever looking at or engaging with the world visually.

  Chris Ware

  Children, Past, Thinking

  4 Copy quote

• I think cartooning gets at, and re-creates on the page, some sixth sense ... in a way no other medium can.

  Chris Ware

  Thinking, Pages, Way

  4 Copy quote

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