Jeff Lemire Quotes

I guess you could say I've been writing all my life.

I didn't intend to become a short-story writer. I became one because I finished a couple of short stories and realized that's what I wanted to do and could do with children and with all the other things in my life.

One poem or story doesn't matter one way or the other. It's the process of writing and life that matters.

I began observing, making paintings of my surroundings, taking a vow of silence, listening, composing music, writing, and making time for formal education. Then I started telling stories.

I'm writing a book and working on my one-woman show, Learning To Be Human.

It took me years of attempts and failed drafts before I finally wrote the elegies I needed to write.

What you compose with is neither here nor there, you compose with words, or you compose with stone plants and trees, or you compose with events; the Sheriff's officer, or whatever.

I tell my workshop students, 'I want you to think of yourselves as artists. Then, when you're writing, you're painting, you're crafting, you're making a design, you're sculpting, you're creating choreography, sound, a sound script.'

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

I don't ever want to impose something on the story. I want the story to tell me.

It is important to make your own stuff. Even if you are not an actor, it is important to not stop involving yourself as a creative person.

For me, making music is a continuous learning experience, and I think that it feeds itself.

In middle school, I started to draw, and my pencil sketches were huge. They were these 4ft by 3ft drawings, and I got a lot of attention for that, so that was very validating. But I didn't start cartooning until I was in college.

I saw I could rhyme words. It came simply to me. But I wrote some pretty horrible songs that I still have on tape.

I like to read and dream and create music that is based on the imagery of text. If you have the combination of a great book and a great filmmaker, what could be better for the composer?

When 'American Born Chinese' started getting a lot of attention, I freaked out a little bit because I realized that up until then I had just been doing comics by following my gut. I didn't really know much about plot structure or anything; I kind of just followed my gut.

You start as an audience member and create a world you're interested in, and then you move into the telling of those stories, bringing what has interested you as an audience member.

I think of myself as a guy who tries to write screenplays and now has tried to direct one. Anything more than that is meaningless and it gets in the way of being a real human being.

I've been directing more and more the last few years, I find it an enjoyable challenge.

In any of the arts, you never stop learning.

It wasn't until I was working on 'Tacky' that I admitted to myself that I was writing a series.

To make personal movies that you are the author of, is quite a difficult thing. It takes a lot of stamina.

For the last three years, I've been working on 'Bromst,' and that's all that encompassed my brain. And now that it's out, it will change the way that I think musically.

I write a lot, and very often I write a couple of lines that are particularly revealing in some kind of way. And then as a few more lines get added and a piece gets added, eventually the song pretty much takes over and you can't really find a way to change those things.

So many stories, and to choose which ones to tell and how to tell them. The words, they will tap me on the shoulder and they will speak to me: 'Tell me! Tell me!' The stories choose me.