Alison Bechdel Quotes

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

That's the biggest part of doing comics: You have to create stuff that makes you want to get out of bed every morning and get to work.

I was writing and cartooning and writing short stories from grade school on.

I think of myself as a storytelling, and one of the reasons why people have held my stuff close to them is because it's one thing to draw pretty pictures, and it's another thing to create a story. That's what I've always done, whether it be for advertising clients or commercial clients or comic books. My hand is in there, and I am the storyteller.

I was a visual artist primarily and a writer, even from a very young age.

I am a 'made' cartoonist, but I was born a comic.

I write novels and other things.

I was trying to be a writer, and I was kind of getting sidetracked, so I started doing cartoons as a form of expression.

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.

I love graphic novels - I love reading them, I enjoyed writing them, I would love to go back and do them again. I hope I'm savvy enough to do them in the right way.

I started writing when I was 9 years old. I was like this weird kid who would just stay in my room, typing little funny magazines and drawing comic strips.

The great thing about making picture books is that you can make absolutely anything you want happen. It's a bit like making a film, but you don't need lots of money for actors and costumes - you just need pens, paper, and your imagination.

The first things I remember drawing were battles - big sheets of paper covered in terrible scenes of carnage - though when you looked closely, there were little jokes and speech bubbles and odd things going on in the background.

I know as a child, I was really interested in becoming a manga artist, to create my own stories and illustrate them and present something that people would be interested in reading and looking at as well.

Mostly I wanted to be a writer, though for a couple of years there I wanted to be an animator, because I loved drawing and capturing beautiful movements.

The writing process isn't something I'm in love with. I'm an illustrator who writes.

When I realized that people actually wrote comics, that it was a job people could do, I thought, 'Gee, these things are only 17 pages long! I could probably finish one of those and find out whether I suck before I've spent five years of my life on it.' In stumbling into comics that way, I discovered that I loved the form.

I have to write what I can write, and writing the text of a picture book is like walking a tightrope, if you ramble off... As my friend Julius Lester says, 'A picture book is the essence of an experience.'

I love being an illustrator because I get to read really great stories, work with amazing people, travel and see places I never would've seen. And I get to draw all the time.

When I started writing and illustrating, I knew little of classic children's literature. My stories came from real life, from my concerns about what was happening in the world.

I get to do what I love every day. I get to crawl into someone else's head and I love that.

You can write a script, but that's just a starting point as a cartoonist. The heart of the process comes when you start to draw it, and you work out how to lay the page out, how best to tell the story.

That's the most amazing thing about writing, whether it's in prose or comics: that you can create something from nothing, and suddenly they come to life, like they've always been there.

A story in your head isn't a story. It's just a daydream until you actually write it down. So write it down.

Your instincts for what's dramatic are the same whether you're working on a drawing or on a script.