Daniel Clowes

I try personally not to be nostalgic.

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.

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

Working on movies made me realize how fluid the medium of film was.

I tend to be the type who is overly polite and sort of ingratiating to other people.

Superman's always chasing after someone who just mugged somebody, and I've never seen that happen in my life.

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.

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.

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.

Even if I only had 10 readers, I'd rather do the book for them than for a million readers online.

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 had no television when I was little, just a stack of old, beat-up comics from the 1950s and 1960s.

I love the medium and I love individual comics, but the business is nothing I would be proud of.

Try letting a Kindle protect your heart from sniper fire!

I'm more interested in characters who are a little difficult.

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.

Yeah, I don't necessarily like endings that contrive an artificial moment of completion.

I was 30 before I made a living that was not embarrassing.

You can never really trust someone who remembers every embarrassing detail of your adolescence.

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

I'm a fan of parchment and wood pulp.

I'm not opposed to comics on the Internet. It's just not interesting to me.

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.

For example, I noticed that every single kid in the high school in 'The Death-Ray' is based on somebody I went to high school with.

People seem to need a likable protagonist more than ever.

I don't read much of anything online.

Nobody else feels the same way about your dog that you do.

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.