Latest Jim Woodring Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• People for whom art is religion can say, "What I love about art is that it points to a higher reality." Well, fine, but the time comes when the smart thing for such a person to do is to let go of the fun of the art and get into the hard work of attaining and understanding that higher reality, unmixed with worldly games.

  Jim Woodring

  Letting Go, Art, Fun

  Interview with Ross Simonini, staging.believermag.com. 2008.

• I don't believe in art like I used to. I believe in something beyond it, something that contains art and everything else. But I just don't quite have the nerve to chuck drawing and painting. Part of it is that I enjoy it too much, and part is that I don't have the courage to renounce the world. I don't want to move out of this nice neighborhood so that I can live in a shed and devote myself to meditating and touching something I can't feel. I'm addicted to the fun of playing in the world.

  Jim Woodring

  Art, Fun, Nice

  Interview with Ross Simonini, staging.believermag.com. 2008.

• A mind in control is always better than a mind out of control. For one thing, a controlled mind can learn much better and go much further than a chaotic one. A person with a steady-state mind has the potential to exit this life with a much greater understanding than someone who is continually learning and forgetting, gaining and misplacing knowledge.

  Jim Woodring

  Understanding, Mind, Exit

  Interview with Ross Simonini, staging.believermag.com. 2008.

• Cartoons are perhaps a bigger part of art than is generally realized, and they influence people in ways that are not always recognized. But creating a monumental work of architecture, or writing a great symphony, is something else. It's a higher order of creation.

  Jim Woodring

  Art, Writing, Symphony

  Interview with Ross Simonini, staging.believermag.com. 2008.

• When I was setting out to be an artist, I said: If I can just produce one work that some people think is good, if I can become an obscure cult artist, that's all I want. Well, I attained that. I'm an obscure cult artist, and I think now, Why didn't I say I want to be another Picasso or something? What other options were open to me? But I was convinced I couldn't achieve great things because I don't have a steady-state mind.

  Jim Woodring

  Thinking, Artist, People

  Interview with Ross Simonini, staging.believermag.com. 2008.

• The books that I do, the stories I write - I'm glad I'm able to do them, but they will quickly be swallowed up by the sands of time. Sometimes it frustrates me that I'm not able to do bigger, more important, more significant things. I guess you have to be content to do whatever it is you can do.

  Jim Woodring

  Book, Writing, Significant Things

  Interview with Ross Simonini, staging.believermag.com.

• I do sort of feel like I'm building my monument with what I do, but it's pretty small and inconsequential compared to real works of genius like this, which are giving vast inspiration to humanity. But I guess I shouldn't even say that. It's ridiculous to say that. You are what you are. My stature suits me.

  Jim Woodring

  Real, Inspiration, Giving

  Interview with Ross Simonini, staging.believermag.com.

• I could never write about the sort of people John Cheever or John Updike or even Margaret Atwood write about. I don't mean I couldn't write as well as they do, which of course I couldn't; they're great writers, and I'm no writer at all. But I couldn't even write badly about normal, neurotic people. I don't know that world from the inside. That's just not my orientation.

  Jim Woodring

  Mean, Writing, People

  Interview with Ross Simonini, staging.believermag.com. 2008.

• The fiction I tend to like is nothing like my own work. I like the kind of writing that shows me things I don't know about, and what I don't know about is the everyday, normal world.

  Jim Woodring

  Writing, Everyday, Normal

  Interview with Ross Simonini, staging.believermag.com. 2008.

• I've often thought I would like to try to write a conventional novel, but I just don't know enough about the real world to write one.

  Jim Woodring

  Real, Writing, Trying

  Interview with Ross Simonini, staging.believermag.com.

• To my way of thinking, the concept drawings that Rembrandt did, the drawings he made that he used to model his artists, to work out the compositions of his paintings: those are cartoons. Look at his sketch for the return of the prodigal son. The expression on the angry younger brother's face. The head is down; the eyebrow is just one curved line over the eyes. It communicates in a very shorthand way. It's beautiful, expressive, and, in a peculiar way, it's more powerful than the kind of stilted, formalized expression in the final painting.

  Jim Woodring

  Beautiful, Brother, Powerful

  Interview with Ross Simonini, staging.believermag.com. 2008.

• I think that cartoons have a lot more power than they're given credit for.

  Jim Woodring

  Thinking, Cartoon, Credit

  Interview with Ross Simonini, staging.believermag.com. 2008.

• I have a personal definition of cartooning, which is, simply, "imaginative drawing." Anything you're drawing that is not in front of you but is a mental construct that you want to express in a drawing is, to me, a cartoon.

  Jim Woodring

  Drawing, Cartoon, Definitions

  Interview with Ross Simonini, staging.believermag.com.

• I wanted to be a pariah, because all my heroes were cult artists, people who devoted their lives to poking into very narrow, very deep corners - Erik Satie, Alfred Jarry, Malcolm Lowry - people who suffered in order to express their vision of life.

  Jim Woodring

  Hero, Artist, Order

  Interview with Ross Simonini, staging.believermag.com. 2008.

• I never experienced anything in my natural state that was as shocking as salvia divinorum`s effects. The condensed extract is murder. I'd smoked some plain leaf and experienced a very alien, very physical sensation, like wheels grinding against each other all over my body. Odd, not pleasant, but not overwhelming. Someone sent me some extract, and I took a big lungful, started counting, and before I reached twenty I was suddenly and without preamble in a completely altered state.

  Jim Woodring

  Body, Wheels, Twenties

  Source: www.believermag.com

• If I had learned how to get along in the quotidian world while keeping up the search for the hidden realm, I might have gotten more out of life. But I believed I was doing hugely important work. I was elitist about it.

  Jim Woodring

  Important, World, Might

  Interview with Ross Simonini, staging.believermag.com.

• Consensus reality seemed like a dull, dead-end street compared to the intense, mutable reality of visions or whatever they were - neurological misfires. I expected life to be full of sudden, inexplicable surprises. When these things didn't happen for a while, life seemed dull and painful.

  Jim Woodring

  Reality, Vision, Dull

  Source: www.believermag.com

• One of the best memories of my life is contemplating that first finished drawing and realizing I had cracked the code, that I could make drawings like this whenever I wanted.

  Jim Woodring

  Memories, Drawing, Firsts

  Intervie with Ross Simonini, staging.believermag.com. 2008.