Chris Ware

“My head looks like an uncooked ham with glasses.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Well, there are better cartoonists now than there ever have been. I firmly believe that. There's some amazing work being done.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“I think it has most to do with the way in which a story is told, whether it feels real either via the music of the telling or the 'honesty' of the story.”

“I have a preponderance to look smug in photos; something to do with the way my mouth turns up at the corners.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“One of the most valuable things one of my art teachers said to me was, ‘Don’t get upset by criticism. Value the fact that at least someone noticed what you did.”

“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.”