Quotes by Daniel Clowes

Comic characters have to have some kind of life breathed into them, and I'm never exactly sure how that's done, but you can tell when it works and when it doesn't. There's nothing worse than looking at a comic when somebody doesn't have that. It's like looking at store windows or something.

I don't think anything to do with who publishes the work matters at all, as long as they're not compromising to get published.

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.

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 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.

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.

There's a lot of great cartoonists working, but I don't see too many people coming along who are of the 'where have you been all my life?' variety.

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.

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.

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.