Stephan Pastis Quotes

You know, the only way I've found to make these pictures is with animators. You can't seem to do it with accountants and bookkeepers.

Painters of paintings, writers of books, never could tell the half.

Some of these sketches were done at the very beginning of the Pirates project, when I was trying to find a direction for myself. That was the early sixties... maybe 61 or 62.

I have a fairly limited drawing style. I'm not like my friend Derek Kirk Kim, who can pretty much change his style at will. My drawing style can handle some of my stories, but not all of them.

There are so many versions of Batman that I love so much from different artists that I had to almost stop trying to draw those versions and get past that and just draw the Jeff Lemire version of Batman eventually.

I think with pictures; I'm a very lousy writer. If I write without pictures, I become this pathetic chick sitting somewhere trying to be interesting.

I think when I'm drawing, I'm seeing what's happening on the page almost as if it were unfolding like a movie in my head.

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

I love animation, I really do, but I don't do it for the children.

A part of my kind of design and inspiration ethos is that I carry around a leather notebook and I sketch in it, doodle in it, write notes in it, and I put pictures in it.

When I draw a character, very often as I'm doing a face, my face mirrors the expression.

All the important drawings I do myself. Every single character is also done by me.

I like the spreads - designing them is a welcome challenge - but for a dyed-in-the-wool page-a-day journeyman like me, it can be tough to leave a drawing unfinished at the end of the workday.

It's exciting to have a role in anything that's Claymation, just because you're always intrigued by what a clay wizard version of yourself would be.

For a long time, I was brilliantly achieving drawings that were inert, suffocating and dark. If ever you need illustrations that are inert, suffocating and dark, I know how to do them.

I believe in sketching because there is something very sensitive in sketching, you know, in sketches that you don't have out of a computer that looks the same like everybody even if, later on, the dresses are OK, but I like to sketch, and I like to see trails made after my sketches that look the same. It is you know, what I like.

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

The detail of my art depends entirely on the project itself. I tend to be a little more detail-oriented with covers than I am with interior pages, and I try to reduce the detail on action sequences as opposed to suspense passages.

My struggle over the years has constantly been, it only takes 10 minutes, or an average shower, to come up with a mini-series or two, but it takes a year to draw them. So for me, it's been just trying to find a way to get all these ideas and all these incidents on paper.

I always loved that solitary experience of making things. There's a solitary aspect to animating... It's ultimately the animator and the puppet coaxing a performance out of it.

Each book requires a different look. Sometimes I get to take a personal direction that's appropriate for the story. I try to push things within a range. Some are rougher, some more expressionistic, some are slicker graphically and call for a prettier drawing style that I can do. Some have a more classical vibe, and some are in between.

It's a pain to draw different-looking humans.

If you ask anyone in animation, how long they've been into animation, they'll pretty much always tell you that it's since they can remember, and I'm no exception. I've always just loved drawing and loved cartoons.

For me, animation is the caricature of life. It's something that we create, from the ground up.

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.