Daniel Clowes quotes:

I was a very fearful little kid, and I would always see the worst in everything. The glass was half-empty. I would see people kissing, and I would think one was trying to bite the other.

When I close my eyes to draw I always think Chicago in 1975.

Dear Josh, we stopped by to fuck you but you didn't answer the door. Therefore you are gay. Sincerely, Tiffany and Amber.

Try letting a Kindle protect your heart from sniper fire!

That's the biggest part of doing comics: You have to create stuff that makes you want to get out of bed every morning and get to work.

Superman's always chasing after someone who just mugged somebody, and I've never seen that happen in my life.

For example, I noticed that every single kid in the high school in 'The Death-Ray' is based on somebody I went to high school with.

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.

I believe in the transformative power of cinema. It is only through this shared dream-experience that we can transcend the oppressive minutiae of daily existence and find some spiritual connection in the deeper reality of our mutual desire.

When people get things for free, they tend to not take them as seriously.

Working on movies made me realize how fluid the medium of film was.

That'll be my claim to fame: My grandmother-in-law is the oldest iPad user!

I tend to be the type who is overly polite and sort of ingratiating to other people.

Yeah, I don't necessarily like endings that contrive an artificial moment of completion.

I think I'm gonna attach myself to the sinking ship that is book publishing.

But I enjoy the opportunity to use swear symbols.

I feel like a lot of my aesthetic was in response to feeling the awfulness and cheapness of that [ the 70'th].

Please allow me the honour of allowing you to bestow upon me a blowjob.

Even if I only had 10 readers, I'd rather do the book for them than for a million readers online.

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.

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.

In an art school it's very hard to tell who is the best.

For me, the whole process involves envisioning this book in my head as I'm working.

Why aren't you girls out stealing hubcaps or shoplifting like normal children?

He always accuses me of trying to look'cool', I was like, 'everybody tries to look cool, I just happen to be successful.

People seem to need a likable protagonist more than ever.

When you see somebody who's got a complaining personality, it usually means that they had some vision of what things could be, and they're constantly disappointed by that. I think that would be the camp that I would fall into - constantly horrified by the things people do.

C'mon, let's go in my room and abuse drugs and stuff!

Maybe I'm just sick of putting more into this friendship than I get out of it.

I'm a fan of parchment and wood pulp.

I love the medium and I love individual comics, but the business is nothing I would be proud of.

I must have been 3 years old or less, and I remember paging through these comics, trying to figure out the stories. I couldn't read the words, so I made up my own stories.

I try personally not to be nostalgic.

You try to make the world a better place and what does it get you? I mean, Christ, how the hell does one man stand a chance against four billion assholes?

In some ways, I never outgrew my adolescence. I wake up in the morning and think, 'Oh my God, I'm late for a math test!' But then I say, 'Wait a minute. I'm 40.

Something I always wanted to do, to capture that later half of the '70s. It's like the early half of the '70s is still the '60s, in that there's still kind of a playfulness and inventiveness in terms of design and the things that were going on in the culture. The second half, it got much more commodified. It's possibly the ugliest era of architecture and clothes and design in the entire 20th century, from 1975 to '81 or '82.

You can give some kind of spark of life to a comic that a photograph doesn't really have. A photograph, even if it's connecting with you, it seems very dead on the page sometimes.

It's much more liberating as a artist to feel like you can approach each page and each panel with the way that inspires you the most. I think the thing that bogs down a lot of artists is that you're kind of stuck drawing in a style you've developed.

I originally just wanted to be an artist.

The secret to being alone is to organize your time; to develop habits and routines and gradually elevate their importance to where they seem almost like normal, healthy activities.

I really want people to read the book, and bookstores never sold an issue of Eightball because nobody knew what it was.

But they always just laugh off everything I say, when really I want absolutely nothing more than to destroy the world they live in and to watch them suffer, alone and miserable, trying to live in my world for a change!

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...

I never feel there's anything I can't do.

Writing screenplays is very freeing from what you can do in comics in a lot of ways. You can change things around. I can take great delight in writing 40 pages, then just pressing delete and getting rid of it and not thinking about it ever again. Whereas in comics, if I had put that kind of effort into it, I couldn't go on.

I had no television when I was little, just a stack of old, beat-up comics from the 1950s and 1960s.

Writing a screenplay, I'm like, "All I'm responsible for is that final script, and I take great effort and pride in that." But once I give it to someone to make, I can disassociate with it entirely and not worry that my vision isn't being represented, because I understand fully that that's not how it works.

I think I've had the fantasy of a ray-gun that could erase the world from the time I was a very little kid.

I think that's what we're all most terrified about: that we'll just die and disappear and we'll leave no trace.

I was 30 before I made a living that was not embarrassing.

In a movie, you have to be mindful that no budget is going to be able to deal with running around the globe at every whim of the writer.

I'm not opposed to comics on the Internet. It's just not interesting to me.

I'm more interested in characters who are a little difficult.

I don't read much of anything online.

There are certain comics that just seem like they have this perfect balance between dialogue and image that I can't not read. I'll want to save it for later, and the next thing I know, I'm reading it. That's what I'm kind of trying to do with my comics.

Everybody just lets the media do their thinking for them... that's why you'll never hear any reggae on the radio!

More and more, I tried to make comics in the way I like to read comics, and I found that when I read comics that are really densely packed with text, it may be rewarding when I finally do sit down and read it, but it never is going to be the first I'm going to read, and I never am fully excited to just sit down and read that comic.

Face it, you hate every single boy on the face of the Earth!" "That's not TRUE, I just hate all these obnoxious, extroverted, pseudo-bohemian art-school losers

I feel like I understood the language of comics. I had a real fluidity with that medium at a very early age.

Comics seldom move me the way I would be moved by a novel or movie.

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.

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.

I think there was a point that I realized I could do what I wanted to do in terms of the drawing. I used to run around a lot of things. I would shy away from certain things that I realized would be horrible for me to draw, and just wouldn't be fun.

Though to the average person that you'll meet on an airplane, if you tell them you draw comics, they'll still have sort of the same response - not like that's seeped into the culture at large, that comics are not just for kids.

I can look at my early work and see what a pained struggle it was to draw what I was drawing. I was trying so hard to get this specific look that was in my head, and always falling short.

I have cultivated a little crew of people whose opinions I understand. It's like the way you'd follow certain film critics because you know what their criteria are, and you may not agree with them, but you can glean from their opinion how you will feel about a film.

Certainly it's great to be able to talk to your friends about something. They might mention a film, and you can find all about it, and you don't have to wait months until you can find a book that might cover the subject and keep it in your head. You can have that kind of immediacy. But there's also something about it, where all the knowledge seems kind of fleeting. All the stuff I learn about in that way, I can be interested in for a day and then it's gone.

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.

That's been my main interest for the last 15 years, is to really make sure the story and the characters take precedence over everything else, and that I give them everything I can to make them exist as actual people.

I've had a real lucky time working in Hollywood. I've talked to other screenwriters, and they're all kind of beaten down and their spirits are crushed, because they work on these screenplays and these projects, and then directors either take them and change everything, rewrite them and make them worse, or they film them and they're nothing like how they imagined it to be.

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.

One of my weekend hobbies is to go look at old houses when there are open houses around here. Just to go look at the architecture. And you can see how many houses were built around 1977, the year where everyone said, "Let's put in these aluminum windows instead of beautiful hand-made wood ones."

Often I'll do research just to get a time period correct, but I didn't have to for the '70s. I feel like I can close my eyes and still see it so clearly.

When I go back and reread the stuff, I'm always floored by how deeply personal and revealing it actually is.

I was thinking the other day that there will never be another form of music that everybody has to respond to - like disco.

As soon as I'm finished with it, it feels like an impersonal project. Like, "Well, I did another book."

I'm always hiding the books in my closet, and my art's always turned upside down in my drawer.

There are certain things in there that no one else would recognize, really. I see details of my life that I didn't even intend to put in when I was doing the work. For example, I noticed that every single kid in the high school in The Death-Ray is based on somebody I went to high school with.

Avatar is a total nerd thing, and yet our popular culture has somehow made all that stuff acceptable.

I think I have a very clear vision of what I want things to look like.

I think that gulf is what makes the work interesting, but as a creator it's endlessly frustrating because I'm starting out with this goal, this thing I'm trying to create, and then the thing I actually do create is very, very different. It's always painful, in some ways, especially when it's just finished.

My feeling is that it's one of the very few things that comics can do that you really can't do in any other medium. I feel like the reader accepts all of these styles, and after a certain point you can flip the pages and see a character rendered very differently than you saw on an earlier page, and it's not jarring. It suggests things that you can't suggest just in the writing or in the plotting.

I think if you had different artists approaching the material in different styles, that's very different. I think it's an interesting thing to discover, what's present in the work even when you're shifting the styles. I've just found it a much stronger way to work.

I've felt that in the past, where I just felt like I had to keep drawing in the same way to maintain this sameness and rhythm throughout an entire book, and it was not really necessary.

I actually start drawing things. Usually they're abandoned before I commit too much time and effort.

I like to leave a little room to innovate and change things around while I'm working.

Alfred Hitchcock talked about planning out his movies so meticulously that when he was actually shooting and editing, it was the most boring thing in the world. But drawing comics isn't like shooting a movie. You can shoot a movie in a few days and be done with it, but drawing a comic takes years and years. That's the biggest part of doing comics: You have to create stuff that makes you want to get out of bed every morning and get to work.

Before I could read, I remember trying to piece together the stories from the images. It was a very primal experience.

I started drawing at a very young age. Writing a story wasn't satisfying, but to actually draw our own world - it's like controlling your own dreams.

Usually when I put together a book like this Death-Ray hardcover or that Ghost World special edition, then I have to reread it and see if there is anything I want to change or any re-coloring I want to do. That's when I'm faced with the actual work. When I'm working, I'm too close to it. I'm sort of inside, and I can't see it at all. So when I have that experience of rereading it years later, it's jarring.