Pete Hamill Quotes

There was a long stint during my childhood after I gave up on being a pro football player - we're talking sixth grade here - that I strongly considered a future writing and drawing comic books. I have been making stuff up ever since.

I guess standup is really painting pictures with words - especially for me, as I describe quite fantastical, visual things. My art teacher, Dexter Dalwood, always seemed to think they were linked. We bonded over our love of Vic Reeves.

I've always had a certain fascination. It's basically paint what you know, and this is what I grew up with.

There was a teacher who recognized that I was interested in cartooning and he was great.

The reward is that you can actually create a world separate from reality with a story, actors, music, and camera design. When it works it can entertain, move people and teach us all.

I had three brilliant English teachers at secondary school. They found the writer in me.

But to me what seems to be missing in a lot of portfolios is Cartooning.

I was very fortunate that a teacher saw that I read a lot and got bored very easily and had a lot of energy, so she said, 'You've got to go to this youth theater.' I joined Manchester Youth Theatre when I was really young, and I just loved putting on and being involved in plays and telling stories.

I like learning things, and I like that writing comics is an excuse to look into new stuff and research and learn new things and hopefully put them in books.

I started writing stories when I was six years old. I was a very shy kid, extremely shy, and I had a fabulous first-grade teacher who told me to write.

Brenda Starr is how I learned to draw. I copied her. I admired her. She had a career.

I'm sometimes a cartoonist, and there's an audience for that, and I'm sometimes an illustrator, and there's an audience for that.

My mom is an artist and my own fiction is deeply visual.

My reason for writing stories is to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more clearly and detailedly and stably the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy which are conveyed to me by certain sights (scenic, architectural, atmospheric, etc.), ideas, occurrences, and images encountered in art and literature.

When I started in the comic book business, 'Art Of' books were strictly the provenance of the greats, like Rembrandt and Da Vinci. But times change, and so do attitudes. Now the comic is considered an art form, and I hope 'A Life in Words and Pictures' contributes a little to that art form's history.

The one artist who actually had influence over me was Bo Bartlett.

We need people who are open to doing something with theme, something with a cartoonish twist.

I didn't set out to be a singer. Actually, the earliest creative efforts I made were drawings copied from comics we got every week at the newsagent, or rearranging photos I cut out and pasted in scrapbooks.

I have felt at times with groups of children that I was really being what every poet would like to be - a bard in the old sense.

When I was a school kid, I used to read lots of comics. This started me on drawing. I would make my own comics about my teddy bear, whose name happened to be Ted.

What I would love is for people to see some of the stories I want to tell.

Mom was a very creative and artistic person and papa is a producer. I've grown up in an extremely colourful environment at home and I haven't been exposed to anything else.

It's really important that, as women, we tell our stories. That is what helps seed our imaginations.

A major writer combines these three - storyteller, teacher, enchanter - but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer.

Books and movies inspire me, but I do my best to keep my stories as original as possible.