Paul Valery Quotes

I have always liked drawing, when you draw you see things more intensely.

My wife will go, 'You know, you're drawing a shoe right now.' I do that all the time.

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.

Work is style, and there is style without thought; not in theory, only in fact. When I take a sentence in my hand, raise it to the light, rub my hand across it, disjoin it, put it back together again with a comma added, raising the pitch in the front part; when I rub the grain of it, comb the fur of it, re-assemble the bones of it, I am making something that carries with it the sound of a voice, the firmness of a hand. Maybe little more.

When I'm drawing a bottle or a town or a market, I transport myself there. So I start drawing everything that I'm looking at while I'm there. Here's a guy selling the meat, and he will have a hook, and you start adding things, and it's a lot of fun.

It is not I that am drawing, it is this thing at the end of my hand.

There's nothing like drawing a thing to make you really see it.

What is drawing? Not once in describing the shape of the mass did I shift my eyes from the model. Why? Because I wanted to be sure that nothing evaded my grasp of it... My objective is to test to what extent my hands already feel what my eyes see.

Drawing is what you see of the world, truly see...And sometimes what you see is so deep in your head you're not even sure of what you're seeing. But when it's down there on paper, and you look at it, really look, you'll see the way things are...that's the world, isn't it? You have to keep looking to find the truth.

Don't think it, ink it.

To be an artist, you don't have to compose music or paint or be in the movies or write books. It's just a way of living. It has to do with paying attention, remembering, filtering what you see and answering back, participating in life.

I was a fine arts major in college, and a painter for many years. And I found that, like writing, art is very similar.

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

I love the line of Flaubert about observing things very intensely. I think our duty as writers begins not with our own feelings, but with the powers of observing.

Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it. Both are impure situations, and I prefer neither.

One must always draw, draw with the eyes, when one cannot draw with a pencil.

You can't do sketches enough. Sketch everything and keep your curiosity fresh.

I don't see the world unless I see it in ink.

Most people draw from the mind, not the eye. They draw the idea of a table or a face, not what's in front of them. We don't actually see the line of the jaw as a line and we don't see an eye as a perfectly outlined almond shape.

I don't really picture anyone when I'm drawing. They just become their own completed person with googly eyes.

It is only by drawing often, drawing everything, drawing incessantly, that one fine day you discover to your surprise that you have rendered something in its true character.

I love detail, like drawing what's on top of someone's coffee table. Maybe there's a little bowl of butterscotch candies on it, next to the four TV remotes.

When I was very little my mother said I used to draw in the air with my fingers. I needed a pencil. Once I could hold one, I have drawn every day since.

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

Growing up, I enjoyed drawing, but it was always in the service of an idea. I drew all the time, and I enjoyed making.