Top 35 Chris Ware Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “The real power of comics is writing as you draw.”

— Chris Ware

3. “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

4. “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

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

— Chris Ware

6. “I guess we all make choices as to how we want to live, right?”

— Chris Ware

7. “As I’ve gotten older I’ve occasionally found myself nostalgic for earlier periods of solitude, though I realize that’s also likely a false nostalgia, as I know there was nothing I wanted more during those periods than to not be alone, whatever that means.”

— Chris Ware

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

— Chris Ware

9. “Comic strip is almost like music on a page that you perform in your mind. It’s not just pictures. There’s a particular rhythm and structure to it that is unlike anything else. It literally is like music. You hear it in your mind as you read it.”

— Chris Ware

10. “Lately, I cant shake the feeling that Ive been living a dream for the last 10 years or so; I cant 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

11. “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

12. “I had a messy signature as a child, and my grandmother said this suggested I had no regard for other people. She was right.”

— Chris Ware

13. “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.”

— Chris Ware

14. “Understand that being able to say, ‘I don’t know what to do with my life’ is an incredible privilege that 99% of the rest of the world will never enjoy.”

— Chris Ware

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

— Chris Ware

16. “Drawing on a computer doesn’t make any sense to me. It’s not intuitive.”

— Chris Ware

17. “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.”

— Chris Ware

18. “The modern world seems to make fun of people in a lot of ways.”

— Chris Ware

19. “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.”

— Chris Ware

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

— Chris Ware

21. “Every city began as a campsite – pg. 25.”

— Chris Ware

22. “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.”

— Chris Ware

23. “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.”

— Chris Ware

24. “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

25. “It’s somehow more comforting to imagine that one’s suffering is unique, and to measure against what one doesn’t know, rather than against what one does.”

— Chris Ware

26. “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.”

— Chris Ware

27. “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

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

— Chris Ware

29. “I believe that the development of language – of naming, categorization, conceptualization – destroys our ability to see as we age.”

— Chris Ware

30. “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.”

— Chris Ware

31. “Whereas in a memory you edit things out and sort of restructure the things to seem a little bit more heroic, or to focus on particular aspects that magnify or reduce certain things.”

— Chris Ware

32. “Comics is different than writing because when you draw something you are trying to visualize it and you are trying to put yourself in that space. And when you’re drawing something, all sorts of associations come up in my mind that I never would have thought of otherwise.”

— Chris Ware

33. “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

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

— Chris Ware

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

— Chris Ware

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

— Chris Ware

37. “Even the disappointing diffusion of a sheer curtain can suggest the most colorful bouquet of unspeakable secrets.”

— Chris Ware

38. “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