Chris Ware Quotes

The real power of comics is writing as you draw.

You can write a little and can draw a little, but there's necessarily a limitation on both in a comic strip, since it appears in such a tiny space.

Cartoonists' dirty secret is that we tend to come up with stories that involve things that are really fun to draw.

Writing and drawing comics for the sheer joy of it - that's true bliss.

Some of my earliest work was in comics. I tend to think in pictures and always like to write scenes possessing the dynamic you find in comics.

I'm just interested in meditating on certain ideas, and I like to draw: that's my way of thinking.

Some graphic narrative art presses against the panel: you wrestle with it at the level of the paper.

Comics are a wonderful form. You can do so much with it.

To be an animator you have to be able to tell stories but I'm not very verbal - I definitely do it through pictures.

When you're writing TV or movies your vernacular is time, it's all based on rhythms, a character takes a beat or two characters have a moment, like everything is about time. And when you're writing a comic, everything is about space. It's how many panels to put on a page, when should you do a full page splash, what is the detail that you see in any particular image.

When you write comic books and when you are writing for television, you're not writing the end product, you are writing notes for someone else to make the end product essentially. My scripts are just directions for the artist to draw pages and the pages are what is seen. I kind of feel like it's a safety net, you're able to hide behind the art to a certain extent, and in television you're able to hide behind the actors and the production, but with novels, your words are it

Drawing is more fun to me than writing. I think it's interesting to talk to different cartoonists about how those activities work for them. I'm a very writerly cartoonist. I certainly spend more time on the writing than I do on the drawing, even though the drawing, of course, is very time-consuming.

I do a lot of research, I try to think about how it relates to music and I just do a ton of drawing. It's much easier to work your ideas out that way.

There is a difference if we see something with a pencil in our hand or without one.

I think the best thing I learned from drawing comics is that it's a great exercise in concision.

I write separately from the inking up. I'm sure this varies from cartoonist to cartoonist; I find that the writing is the hard part and the drawing is the fun part.

When I was writing songs, I always thought I'd make more of a career out of the drawings, the comics even more than the music.

The term comics long ago became obsolete and inaccurate. It merely defined the content of the early joke-based comical strips. Sequential Art is a more accurate description of the form. I first suggested it because I believed something needed to be done to correct the feeling of inferiority by artists and writers in this field.

When I put together a graphic novel, I don't think about literary prose. I think about storytelling.

People unacquainted with graphic novels, including journalists, tend to think of 'Watchmen' as a book by Alan Moore that happens to have some illustrations. And that does a disservice to the entire form.

I didn't have the time to literally write and draw the strip at the same time.

Comic books and graphic novels are a great medium. It's incredibly underused.

All the pictures I could never do, I'll do it in comics. All the comics I do are the pictures I could never do.

Sometimes I wish the writing and drawing were more integrated.

For me, drawing is a way of navigating the imagination, and it remains the fundamental vehicle of my practice. Drawing allows me to be at my most inventive.