Top 35 Art Spiegelman Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “To die, it’s easy. But you have to struggle for life.”

— Art Spiegelman

2. “Comics are a gateway drug to literacy.”

— Art Spiegelman

3. “The technology that threatens to kill off books as we know them – the ‘physical book,’ a new phrase in our language – is also making the physical book capable of being more beautiful than books have been since the middle ages.”

— Art Spiegelman

4. “With any work worth its salt, you have to trust the author enough to take its measure. And if you apply too many preconceptions, you are not taking its measure.”

— Art Spiegelman

5. “If you want to live, it’s good to be friendly.”

— Art Spiegelman

6. “No matter what I accomplish, it doesn’t seem like much compared to surviving Auschwitz.”

— Art Spiegelman

7. “I know this is insane, but i somehow wish i had been in auschwitz with my parents so i could really know what they lived through! I guess it’s some kind of guilt about having had an easier life than they did.”

— Art Spiegelman

8. “Anja? What is to tell? Everywhere I look I’m seeing Anja... From my good eye, from my glass eye, if they’re open or they’re close, always I’m thinking on Anja.”

— Art Spiegelman

9. “But here God didn’t come. We were all on our own.”

— Art Spiegelman

10. “Maybe your father needed to show that he was always right – that he could always SURVIVE – because he felt GUILTY about surviving.”

— Art Spiegelman

11. “Yes, life always takes the side of life, and somehow the victims are blamed. But it wasn’t the best people who survived, nor did the best ones die. It was random!”

— Art Spiegelman

12. “I live in my own bubble. I was looking for an audience that wouldn’t necessarily be looking for escapism when they came to my comics.”

— Art Spiegelman

13. “One way of understanding a graphic novel is that it’s an ambitious comic and one way or another my comics have had ambitions. I have no problem with escapism. When I get my depressions all I want to do is escape reality.”

— Art Spiegelman

14. “I became a degenerate artist. My parents were shaped by their own experiences, and artists weren’t so useful in the death camps.”

— Art Spiegelman

15. “Well, I am not 100 percent sure of the definition of polemic, but it wasn’t meant to convince anybody of anything.”

— Art Spiegelman

16. “I wanted to create comics as soon as a I learned humans were behind them, that they were not natural phenomena like trees and boulders.”

— Art Spiegelman

17. “Comics can be pernicious, fascist propaganda or anti-authoritarian. The ones that shaped me were particularly anti-authoritarian.”

— Art Spiegelman

18. “A manifesto, a diary, a crumpled suicide note, and a still relevant love letter.”

— Art Spiegelman

19. “Style is a capitalist invention. It’s a trademark. It’s very useful in the world of commerce to have a good trademark, but it wasn’t my first concern. I got restless.”

— Art Spiegelman

20. “What’s called art now probably has some legitimate things happening in it, but I’ve become more and more distrustful of a lot of it because it seems like an extension of the fashion trade and the stock market.”

— Art Spiegelman

21. “I became comfortable with what I knew would be the process of trying to pick up the pieces of brain that were in the rubble and tried to make some mosaic out of the pieces and that that would be the trajectory.”

— Art Spiegelman

22. “Some of the reviewers wanted less. Some wanted lots more. Some wanted lots more of something else. But these strips are exactly what they are.”

— Art Spiegelman

23. “I’m supposed to be making comics, so I had to do it the best way I knew how, which is what those guys at the beginning of the Twentieth Century were doing.”

— Art Spiegelman

24. “I always had more allergies toward the superhero comics than the others. I thought those were aimed more toward the people who would beat me up.”

— Art Spiegelman

25. “There’s a therapeutic aspect to all making, but the nature of working is to compress, condense, and shape stuff, not to just expunge it. It’s not just an exorcism.”

— Art Spiegelman

26. “I would say that, in the future, the book will be reserved for things that function best as a book. So, if I need a textbook that’s going to be out of date because of new technological inventions, you’re better off having it where you can download the supplements or the update.”

— Art Spiegelman

27. “In 1908, you could easily earn $20 to $200 as a cartoonist. What’s amazing is that it’s still true!”

— Art Spiegelman

28. “I think a lot of America turned to art and culture after Sept. 11. I know the sales of bibles went shooting up, but so did the sales of poetry. I think in a crisis one looks to one’s culture, partially to give validation to why one would want that culture to survive.”

— Art Spiegelman

29. “Instead of yelling at a TV set, I get to talk.”

— Art Spiegelman

30. “Comics seem to be cooking these days. It’s like being a rock star.”

— Art Spiegelman

31. “I won’t go to their gas chambers! And my children won’t go to their gas chambers. Bibi! Lonia! Richieu! Come here quickly!”

— Art Spiegelman

32. “It wasn’t so easy like you think. Everybody was so starving and frightened, and tired they couldn’t believe even what’s in front of their eyes.”

— Art Spiegelman

33. “It’s as if life equals winning, so death equals losing.”

— Art Spiegelman

34. “He’s more attached to things than people.”

— Art Spiegelman

35. “No, darling! To die it’s easy... But you have to stuggle for life!”

— Art Spiegelman

36. “Maybe everyone has to feel guilty. Everyone! Forever!”

— Art Spiegelman

37. “But in some ways he didn’t survive.”

— Art Spiegelman

38. “Es bueno ser simpatico si quieres vivir.”

— Art Spiegelman

39. “Sometimes I don’t feel like a functioning adult.”

— Art Spiegelman