Jules Feiffer Quotes

If an artist may say nothing except what he has invented by his own sole efforts, it stands to reason he will be poor in ideas. If he could take what he wants wherever he could find it, as Euripides and Dante and Michelangelo and Shakespeare and Bach were free, his larder would always be full, and his cookery might be worth tasting.

When I was a kid, I desperately wanted more background information on especially cartoonists.

Music is the doorway that has led me to drawing, photography, and writing.

My influences change all the time; they have to remain current, because they're the things that capture your imagination and make you want to go into the studio.

When starting a project, your influences are the things around you. It doesn't mean you have to sound like it or look like it or anything. It's just something new, and your curiosity becomes enthralled by it.

A lot of times, the idea of a comic will be, 'Wouldn't it be cool if you...' But instead of doing it, I'll draw a comic about it.

There's nothing new, even 'new' is inspired by something. We're all, either consciously or unconsciously, we're inspired.

I always idealized the mainstream cartoonists and the packed schedule they worked under.

I can get inspired, like anyone, from movies or music or TV or a certain way people think.

I'm not really a guy who draws on things from my own past.

In the same way, I can wake up with a very positive idea of what I want to do for my collection, and be completely desperate at night regarding the same thing. And I do a lot of other things too: Writing for me is almost as important as drawing my collection.

If you're going to be an artist, real life is your inspiration.

I do sculpting sometimes when I have the time, and the first thing I sculpted was a bust of [Albert] Einstein. It still sits on my table and still inspires me. He was a person who triggered my imagination and my ideas.

Anything that propels me to create, like [my book, Straight Walk]. It kept me inspired for almost four years.

Still I should paint my own places best; painting is with me but another word for feeling, and I associate "my careless boyhood" with all that lies on the banks of the Stour; those scenes made me a painter, and I am grateful; that is, I had often thought of pictures of them before ever I touched a pencil, and your picture ['The White Horse'] is one of the strongest instance I can recollect of it.

Sometimes listening to music can motivate you. It can. But if you're a musician, that isn't always the way to get new ideas because you don't want to take somebody else's ideas. You need to find your own. So if you go to different artistic mediums, whether it's dance or it's visual arts or films or books, stories, sometimes it gets you hearing things, hearing progressions that you wouldn't come up with if you were just listening to other music because you don't want to copy progressions you've just heard.

I have my permanent muses and my muses of the moment.

Everything I see and hear... I will take ideas from anyplace, anywhere, anytime, and life has become a song to me. I'm always looking for a song.

You'd have to be completely crazy not to be influenced by and take from other artists. It's completely impossible not to.

I'd listen to all the stuff that was going on around me and drift off into my fantasies about it. My fantasies have fuelled all the songs I've ever written.

Inspiration is an awakening, a quickening of all man's faculties, and it is manifested in all high artistic achievements.

As soon as I start reading, drawing comes to me more easily. I find I work in my sketchbooks more. But if I'm working on a new show, my reading completely stops except when I'm on a plane. I take a stack of New Yorkers with me. I feel awful about those stacks of New Yorkers.

The most valiant thing you can do as an artist is inspire someone else to be creative.

I believe in originality, primarily. However, it's important to know what there has been before to aim in that direction. Art history informs us. It informs our mind. I like to look at books, exhibitions, paintings, as a computer, subconsciously taking on information.