Top 60 Daniel Clowes Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Daniel Clowes

2. “I think I have a very clear vision of what I want things to look like.”

— Daniel Clowes

3. “I started drawing at a very young age. Writing a story wasn’t satisfying, but to actually draw our own world – it’s like controlling your own dreams.”

— Daniel Clowes

4. “The secret to being alone is to organize your time; to develop habits and routines and gradually elevate their importance to where they seem almost like normal, healthy activities.”

— Daniel Clowes

5. “But they always just laugh off everything I say, when really I want absolutely nothing more than to destroy the world they live in and to watch them suffer, alone and miserable, trying to live in my world for a change!”

— Daniel Clowes

6. “He always accuses me of trying to look’cool’, I was like, ’everybody tries to look cool, I just happen to be successful.”

— Daniel Clowes

7. “I believe in the transformative power of cinema. It is only through this shared dream-experience that we can transcend the oppressive minutiae of daily existence and find some spiritual connection in the deeper reality of our mutual desire.”

— Daniel Clowes

8. “Avatar is a total nerd thing, and yet our popular culture has somehow made all that stuff acceptable.”

— Daniel Clowes

9. “I think I’m gonna attach myself to the sinking ship that is book publishing.”

— Daniel Clowes

10. “Maybe I’m just sick of putting more into this friendship than I get out of it.”

— Daniel Clowes

11. “You were right, everybody hates my new car. Becky said it was a goth dorkmobile.”

— Daniel Clowes

12. “Why aren’t you girls out stealing hubcaps or shoplifting like normal children?”

— Daniel Clowes

13. “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.”

— Daniel Clowes

14. “In an art school it’s very hard to tell who is the best.”

— Daniel Clowes

15. “Though to the average person that you’ll meet on an airplane, if you tell them you draw comics, they’ll still have sort of the same response – not like that’s seeped into the culture at large, that comics are not just for kids.”

— Daniel Clowes

16. “I have cultivated a little crew of people whose opinions I understand. It’s like the way you’d follow certain film critics because you know what their criteria are, and you may not agree with them, but you can glean from their opinion how you will feel about a film.”

— Daniel Clowes

17. “I’m always hiding the books in my closet, and my art’s always turned upside down in my drawer.”

— Daniel Clowes

18. “I’ve felt that in the past, where I just felt like I had to keep drawing in the same way to maintain this sameness and rhythm throughout an entire book, and it was not really necessary.”

— Daniel Clowes

19. “One of my weekend hobbies is to go look at old houses when there are open houses around here. Just to go look at the architecture. And you can see how many houses were built around 1977, the year where everyone said, “Let’s put in these aluminum windows instead of beautiful hand-made wood ones.””

— Daniel Clowes

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

— Daniel Clowes

21. “At a certain point, I realized that I could draw anything, and there was nothing I should avoid – I could make it work. That’s opened me up to being able to be much more comfortable telling any kind of story.”

— Daniel Clowes

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

22. “If I could have somehow been the kind of artist who could crank out two or three issues a year, that’s different. That’s sort of what it’s all about, to get this thing out so that there’s some kind of continuity. But to do a comic book every year or two was just so anti-climactic.”

— Daniel Clowes

23. “I think there was a point that I realized I could do what I wanted to do in terms of the drawing. I used to run around a lot of things. I would shy away from certain things that I realized would be horrible for me to draw, and just wouldn’t be fun.”

— Daniel Clowes

Featured in: Fun Quotes

24. “Often I’ll do research just to get a time period correct, but I didn’t have to for the ’70s. I feel like I can close my eyes and still see it so clearly.”

— Daniel Clowes

25. “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.”

— Daniel Clowes

26. “I feel like I understood the language of comics. I had a real fluidity with that medium at a very early age.”

— Daniel Clowes

27. “You need to be, like, turning down high-paying illustration work because you want to work on your comic. That’s when you know you’re doing something good.”

— Daniel Clowes

28. “As soon as I’m finished with it, it feels like an impersonal project. Like, “Well, I did another book.””

— Daniel Clowes

29. “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.”

— Daniel Clowes

30. “When I go back and reread the stuff, I’m always floored by how deeply personal and revealing it actually is.”

— Daniel Clowes

31. “I really want people to read the book, and bookstores never sold an issue of Eightball because nobody knew what it was.”

— Daniel Clowes

32. “Everybody just lets the media do their thinking for them... that’s why you’ll never hear any reggae on the radio!”

— Daniel Clowes

33. “It’s much more liberating as a artist to feel like you can approach each page and each panel with the way that inspires you the most. I think the thing that bogs down a lot of artists is that you’re kind of stuck drawing in a style you’ve developed.”

— Daniel Clowes

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

— Daniel Clowes

35. “I like to leave a little room to innovate and change things around while I’m working.”

— Daniel Clowes

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

— Daniel Clowes

37. “I try to only work on the screenplays for a few hours a day when I’m in my most voluble mood, just sort of writing whatever comes into my head. It’s a very freeing thing.”

— Daniel Clowes

38. “I think if you had different artists approaching the material in different styles, that’s very different. I think it’s an interesting thing to discover, what’s present in the work even when you’re shifting the styles. I’ve just found it a much stronger way to work.”

— Daniel Clowes

39. “For a moment, all movement ceases and the scene is one of crystalline stillness, silent except for a slow, melodramatic heartbeat.”

— Daniel Clowes

40. “I never feel there’s anything I can’t do.”

— Daniel Clowes

41. “But I enjoy the opportunity to use swear symbols.”

— Daniel Clowes

42. “I’m a fan of parchment and wood pulp.”

— Daniel Clowes

43. “Comics seldom move me the way I would be moved by a novel or movie.”

— Daniel Clowes

44. “C’mon, let’s go in my room and abuse drugs and stuff!”

— Daniel Clowes

45. “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.”

— Daniel Clowes

46. “There are certain comics that just seem like they have this perfect balance between dialogue and image that I can’t not read. I’ll want to save it for later, and the next thing I know, I’m reading it. That’s what I’m kind of trying to do with my comics.”

— Daniel Clowes

Featured in: Reading Quotes

47. “I knew how to draw all of the different smokestacks on the old trains and all that stuff, and then I realized that if I can draw trains, which is the thing I was probably the least interested in in the world at the time, I can do anything and find a way into it that will be interesting.”

— Daniel Clowes

48. “I can look at my early work and see what a pained struggle it was to draw what I was drawing. I was trying so hard to get this specific look that was in my head, and always falling short.”

— Daniel Clowes

49. “I actually start drawing things. Usually they’re abandoned before I commit too much time and effort.”

— Daniel Clowes

50. “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.”

— Daniel Clowes