Top 35 David Rees Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “I never thought I would make a living as a pencil-sharpener. The first goal was: I don’t want to lose money. And then the goal was: I want to see if 100 people buy my pencils. I just kept upping the benchmarks.”

— David Rees

2. “I’ve never been good at self-promotion. And my URL is really obscure. And for years and years, there was nothing about me on my website.”

— David Rees

3. “Once you use a toothbrush to clean a pencil sharpener, you should no longer use it to clean your teeth.”

— David Rees

4. “I like feeling like I’m discovering something new. That’s really a special feeling and also, you don’t have it that often. At least, I don’t. Maybe I’m not creative enough.”

— David Rees

5. “I don’t even drink Coke. It tastes like robot sweat.”

— David Rees

6. “I started sharpening pencils at the census and how that was a difficult time in my life because my marriage was ending and I had quit cartooning and I didn’t know what to do with myself.”

— David Rees

7. “I have very limited craftsmanship. And a lot of the stuff I make plays on that.”

— David Rees

8. “The thing that was interesting to me about Relationshapes – as opposed to most of the other cartoons I’ve ever made – was I knew when one worked and when one didn’t work, but I couldn’t really explain it.”

— David Rees

9. “I wanted to get paid to sharpen pencils originally just because I thought it would be fun.”

— David Rees

10. “I’d always been really intimidated by prose writing.”

— David Rees

11. “The time that I would spend revisiting my old Get Your War On strips is more profitably spent Googling myself and reading comments about how people hate my pencil-sharpening business.”

— David Rees

12. “I’m interested in the structure of art and how it works. And the content is also interesting, but I don’t want to keep the same structure and just plug in new content every week.”

— David Rees

13. “Nobody could be a professional cartoonist, because you have to do something you don’t like to do in order to be a responsible adult and pay the rent.”

— David Rees

14. “The things I’m grateful for are: I had the one thing that I feel really lucky about, which is that I made something, I made art, that truly – in a weird way – truly comforted me and comforted a lot of people. And I’m really grateful that I got to have that experience.”

— David Rees

15. “I got to draw shapes. I really like to draw funky, geometric shapes. And I got to use just different fonts and make a joke of how feminine it was, but it didn’t even have people in it. To me, it was so exciting and interesting to do that for a while.”

— David Rees

16. “Talking about my personal life onstage, I’ve realized I’m not one of those comics who can do that. I can allude to it but I don’t want to be a confessional performer...”

— David Rees

17. “I hate self-publishing; it’s a real drag and it takes up a lot of space.”

— David Rees

18. “I was just worried that someone was gonna think that I had been commissioned by Jamba Juice to make cartoons about Jamba Juice. And the big thing for me was – if I’m not getting paid to sell out, I don’t want people to think that I’m selling out.”

— David Rees

19. “I hardly ever use pencils. I’m left-handed and it’s really messy if you’re left-handed because of the graphite smudging. I use them more now than I used to because there’s, like, 15,000 pencils all over my house.”

— David Rees

20. “I’ve been really surprised about a lot of the negative comments about artisanal pencil sharpening. Like, it really rubs some people the wrong way.”

— David Rees

21. “I just wanted a really simple, dramatic way so that fans, people who were reading my comic, would be like, “This is something different.” Just to flag it, almost.”

— David Rees

22. “Obviously, I never had to sketch anything out. To me, that was the appeal of working with clip art, working digitally. You make it and it’s done.”

— David Rees

23. “I liked sharpening pencils and I was like, “Oh, I wonder if I could get paid to do it.” And I figured it out and I did it.”

— David Rees

24. “I talked to people in the pencil industry and I talked to people as I was sharpening their pencils about the frustrations they have with pencils, so I really did do my research and I do know more about pencils than most people.”

— David Rees

25. “I like to do things that are new, where I feel the sense of discovery.”

— David Rees

26. “I’m not a professional comedian. Nobody comes to my comedy shows. That’s just a little hobby.”

— David Rees

27. “I’ve always liked Richard Pryor. I’ve always responded to rhythmic profanity.”

— David Rees

28. “The way you make money is to do something you don’t like to do. And that’s how you know you’re a virtuous person.”

— David Rees

29. “I would make a comic for Rolling Stone every two weeks, because they’re biweekly. And then I would make weekly comics for my weekly papers. It was on two parallel tracks. And then they all got collected in a book.”

— David Rees

30. “I felt really conflicted about making money off stuff that’s creatively satisfying.”

— David Rees

31. “It would be amazing to tell my grandchildren, like, ‘Yeah, I was paid to sharpen 1,000 pencils.’”

— David Rees

32. “People think, “Wow, people in America have so much money, they’re sending hundreds of pencils to this guy.” I don’t think those people realize that most people who are buying these pencils are buying them as art objects or conversation pieces.”

— David Rees

33. “I feel like really thinking about art and really appreciating it and learning the language of it just makes you more of a connoisseur. I believe that.”

— David Rees

34. “I don’t think I would’ve ever dared dreaming of becoming a professional cartoonist. I wouldn’t set myself up for that disappointment.”

— David Rees

35. “I didn’t dare to dream of making money. But now of course, I’ve made many thousands of dollars sharpening pencils.”

— David Rees

36. “To me, if you’re lucky enough to make stuff that people will pay money for, do a good job. Really do a good job. Especially if you’re talking about real stuff, like terror atrocities and human rights abuses and pencil-sharpening techniques.”

— David Rees

37. “Everyone has pencils in their house, no matter how hip and contemporary they are.”

— David Rees

38. “I don’t want to be one of these people who’s like, “Man, I don’t know where my ideas come from and I don’t know why this works.””

— David Rees

39. “I had good relationships with stores. And I was like, “All right, I’ll self-publish it. But I’m only going to do 1,000.””

— David Rees