Daniel Clowes Thinking Quotations

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.