Chris Ware Quotes

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Chris Ware

Profession : Artist

Birth : December 28, 1967

My grandmother was an unparalleled storyteller who gave me a preview of how life might turn out, and also fortified my empathy.

Chris Ware

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.

Chris Ware

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.

Chris Ware

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.

Chris Ware

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.

Chris Ware

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.

Chris Ware

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.

Chris Ware

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.

Chris Ware

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.

Chris Ware

The thing I like most about books is that anybody can afford them. They have an innate valuelessness.

Chris Ware

Cartoons are not real drawings, because they are drawings intended to be read.

Chris Ware

Drawing on a computer doesn't make any sense to me. It's not intuitive.

Chris Ware

One of the things that appealed to me most about comics was that you can pick the ones you like and build your own personal pantheon.

Chris Ware

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.

Chris Ware

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.

Chris Ware

A book sometimes seems to impose a through-line to life that real life doesn't actually have.

Chris Ware

During my Austin years, I was drawing a regular strip for the University Of Texas newspaper, going to school, delivering blood, and trying to change my approach and 'style' as much as I could, since I knew that I'd calcify as I got older.

Chris Ware

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.

Chris Ware

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.

Chris Ware

My mother was always encouraging about my wanting to be an artist.

Chris Ware