Words matter. These are the best Chris Ware Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
When I was 11 years old, I thought, ‘All I really wanna be able to do is my own comic book,’ and I’m doing it. I don’t have any other real ambitions. I have nothing to conquer at all.
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.
The thing I like most about books is that anybody can afford them. They have an innate valuelessness.
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.
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.
I had a messy signature as a child, and my grandmother said this suggested I had no regard for other people. She was right.
My grandmother was an unparalleled storyteller who gave me a preview of how life might turn out, and also fortified my empathy.
I believe that the development of language – of naming, categorization, conceptualization – destroys our ability to see as we age.
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.
The thing I don’t understand is why so often one hears discussion of the fruits of human labor as if it’s all the creation of some alien race.
I don’t think there’s any independent cartoonist whose stuff I don’t like or respect in at least some way or another. We’re all marginal laborers – we’re practically medical oddities – so I don’t see why we can’t all be nice to each other.
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.
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.
A book sometimes seems to impose a through-line to life that real life doesn’t actually have.
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.
My mother was always encouraging about my wanting to be an artist.
Cartoons are not real drawings, because they are drawings intended to be read.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I have a preponderance to look smug in photos; something to do with the way my mouth turns up at the corners.
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.
My head looks like an uncooked ham with glasses.
