Jim Woodring Quotes
-
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
People aren't interested in seeing themselves as they really are.
→ -
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.
→ -
When I started formulating the first Frank comic, I knew I wanted it to be something that was beyond time and specific place. I felt that having the characters speak would tie it to 20th-century America, because that would be the idiom of the language they would use, the language I use.
→ -
I'm not a freak. I'm not really crazy or anything. I don't think I'm really abnormal. It's just, like anybody else, I have interests I cultivate, and one of my interests is not getting too used to things. I've sacrificed a lot of things in my life in order to keep that sense of things being unfamiliar.
→ -
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.
→ -
Oh, I was never a very big Jim Woodring fan. I've never thought his work was that great.
→ -
It takes more drawing to tell a story in pantomime.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
Alternative cartoonists have to rely on comic book stores to get their stuff in the hands of readers.
→ -
A tree is an incomprehensibl e mystery.
→ -
I think that cartoons have a lot more power than they're given credit for.
→ -
I've heard that Alfred Hitchcock said that by the time he was ready to shoot a film, he didn't even want to do it any more because he'd already had all of the fun of working it out. It's the same thing with these Frank comics.
→ -
Real shapes and real patterns are things you would observe in nature, like the marks on the back of a cobra's hood or the markings on a fish or a lizard. Imaginary shapes are just that, symbols that come to a person in dreams or reveries and are charged with meaning.
→ -
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.
→ -
Leslie Stein's comics give readers privileged access to a complete and wholly original world of gently skewed wonders.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
When I was a kid, I used to see apparitions and have hallucinations, and my entire perception of the world was badly disoriented. And I had kind of a chaotic childhood because of that. I've really hung onto it, though. Because I actually like those feelings.
→ -
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.
→ -
Every time I write something down I check it to see if it has that telltale glow, the glow that tells me there's something there. If it glows, it stays. Everything is either on or off.
→ -
That Moorish architecture is all over the place, of course. It affects me everywhere I see it, as it does so many people. But Brand Library was a special place to me, and I know I've paid homage to it many times in my drawings.
→ -
Comics could use more creators with something worthwhile to say.
→
Related Authors
-
Daniel Clowes Cartoonist -
Shia LaBeouf Actor -
Jaime Hernandez Comic Book Creator -
Craig Thompson Novelist -
Tony Millionaire Cartoonist -
Tom Kenny Actor -
Andy Richter Actor -
Shaun Tan Illustrator -
Ivan Brunetti Cartoonist -
Harvey Pekar Film writer -
Seth Cartoonist -
Chip Kidd Author -
Robert Crumb Cartoonist -
Chris Ware Artist -
Gilberto Hernandez Cartoonist -
Art Spiegelman Cartoonist -
David Mazzucchelli Writer -
Alison Bechdel Cartoonist -
Mark Ryden Painter -
Will Eisner Cartoonist
Popular Topics
- Playing Dress Up
- Tense
- Battle Cry
- White Teeth
- Only Thing That Matters
- Third Person
- Failure Of Leadership
- Bangs
- Absolute Freedom
- Laugh Out Loud Funny
- Socialist Party
- Economic Independence
- Nominating
- Solitude
- Close Family
- Mediterranean Sea
- Putting Yourself Out There
- Everyday Things
- Nice Person
- 21st Century