Harvey Pekar Quotes

Comics are words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures.

I think back to my time in children's television, back in the 1970s, and the amount of innovation that was going on then. Because the mass market wasn't focused on it, so you had a freedom to do amazing things, like 'Vision On,' and 'Tiswas.'

You never know what you do that could be totally out of left field, which actually might work and give something fresh to the whole scene, to the character, whatever. If you have that with a director who then knows how to shape it, either in the direction, in the moment, or in the editing, then that's good.

I think I'm always trying to subvert conventions, and sometimes it's more successful than others.

Doing graphic novels is cool! It's fun! You get to write something, and then see it visually page by page, panel by panel, working with the artist, you get to see it fleshed out.

We're living in a tremendously new landscape, and the possibility of what can be created is immense. These tools of the moving image have a relatively short history in art, and what we can do with them is still largely unknown. We are still innovating and finding ways to tell stories.

I began taking liberties a long time ago; now it is standard practice for most directors to ignore the rules.

I think that if you're doing a new musical, you want to have the opportunity to experiment and try things without the whole city of critics looking over your shoulder.

You can sometimes break rules in comics that you can't necessarily break in cinema. It's fun to find something cool in a comic and then try and find a way to break the same rule in another medium.

One of the wonderful things that I've always loved as an art student, what I always loved about comics, was that they are interpreted differently by different graphic artists all the time, so now film is doing that thanks to Marvel Studios.

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

I read comics because of the art.

I remember on my very first film, which Steven Soderberg executive-produced, he said, 'Try not to repeat yourself. Do things that scare you.' Even if it's a challenge, I want people to say that this guy tried this thing. Hopefully he learned from it.

People underestimate the complexity of comic books.

As a film-maker, it's only natural to feel happy about new possibilities opening up.

I have never tried to bind myself in some kind of an image on screen. I have always tried to do different things.

I looked at comics like a buffet table, where you take a little bit of something and leave the other stuff behind.

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

An artist should be taking risks. That's the whole idea of being an artist.

I love the idea of messing around with different mediums.

Photography is not a sport. It has no rules. Everything must be dared and tried!

An artist, to achieve anything in art, has to finally do the thing that nobody else wants to do and nobody else has thought to do.

That's the artist's role - to strike out always for something new, to break away, to defy, to... grapple with the unfamiliar.

The show, like everything we have done and still do, is just one more experiment.

We live in a world where art is always looked upon as the perfect medium. We live in a society where we can alter our body parts, we can act in the most perfect or right way. A lot of that is dangerous because, especially in the world of art, the chief enemy of creativity is being safe. If you're safe, you can't fall and hurt yourself. The older you are, the further down the crash is going to be. But if it works out, the higher the high.