Chris Ware Quotes
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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.
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I can definitely say that of all my friends who I consider to be really great cartoonists, we're all trying to aim at basically the same thing, which is an ever closer representation of what it feels like to be alive.
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My wife has joked that if anything ever happened to me, she'd gladly live out her life without anyone else around. I think it bugs her I'm home all the time; such is the life cycle of the cartoonist, however.
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As I've gotten older I've occasionally found myself nostalgic for earlier periods of solitude, though I realize that's also likely a false nostalgia, as I know there was nothing I wanted more during those periods than to not be alone, whatever that means.
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Lately, I can't shake the feeling that I've been living a dream for the last 10 years or so; I can't 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.
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Ragtime has about the same amount of respect as comics. And in a way they're similar art forms. Ragtime is highly compositional, and the emotion in the music is built in, whereas in jazz a lot of that emotion comes from the way it's performed.
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A book sometimes seems to impose a through-line to life that real life doesn't actually have.
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There seems to be such a laziness in - and I hate to use this phrase - the modern world. Everything is pumped out so quickly so that you can read it while passing by, like billboards or those flashcards before movie shows.
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I had a messy signature as a child, and my grandmother said this suggested I had no regard for other people. She was right.
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The thing I like most about books is that anybody can afford them. They have an innate valuelessness.
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I still can't get over the idea that respectable adults now go to see superhero movies and that such films get reviewed in the 'New Yorker.' Clearly, I am seriously out of step with the times.
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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.
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I think it has most to do with the way in which a story is told, whether it feels real either via the music of the telling or the 'honesty' of the story.
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I guess I just don't like being physically in front of people I don't know very well, because I expect to be 'seen through,' or, even worse, instantly hated.
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Mostly, I was only interested in television as a kid, and the majority of reading material I collected was an adjunct to that central concern, comic books and magazines included.
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Sometimes I get worried I'm getting too caught up in the nauseatingly oily smoothness of my own line, when all I'm trying to do is make it as clear as possible.
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The first thing I do when I get up is I look out the window. I've been looking at the same image for six years. It's imprinted in my mind like an afterimage template.
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No one blames themselves if they don't understand a cartoon, as they might with a painting or 'real' art; they simply think it's a bad cartoon.
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The real power of comics is writing as you draw.
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My mother was always encouraging about my wanting to be an artist.
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I prefer to imagine that my wife, a few friends, and occasionally my mom are the only ones who read what I do, though I realize that this is somewhat unrealistic.
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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.
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When I was a kid, I liked books that just seemed so dense you could lose yourself in them for a whole afternoon. They were like their own whole world.
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There seems to be a peculiar kind of clamor for comics. And I'm not sure how much a part of reality that is. I think partly it's based on some idea that comics are what everybody wants to read - and I don't think that's the case.