Cartoonist Quotes

Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.

Sweetheart, I'm the biggest ripped-off cartoonist in the history of the world, and that's all I'm going to say.

There is a relationship between cartooning and people like Mir? and Picasso which may not be understood by the cartoonist, but it definitely is related even in the early Disney.

In 1908, you could easily earn $20 to $200 as a cartoonist. What's amazing is that it's still true!

Most success springs from an obstacle or failure.

When I look around and see how aged cartoonists continue to work on their manga and how movie directors create new movies all the time, I understand that they would never retire. And by the same token, I guess I will still be making games somehow. The only question is whether the younger people will be willing to work with me at that far point in the future.

When you're curious, you find lots of interesting things to do.

Too often cartoonists just look at other cartoonists and, after a lot of inbreeding, everyone has the same funny look. The challenge of drawing is that there is no one right way to visually describe something. It's a good thing to confront your limitations and preconceptions every so often.

Sometimes you lie in bed at night, and you don't have a single thing to worry about...That always worries me!

I started on the fringes of journalism as a cartoonist on The Daily Mail.

The Voice There is a voice inside of you That whispers all day long, "I feel this is right for me, I know that this is wrong." No teacher, preacher, parent, friend Or wise man can decide What's right for you--just listen to The voice that speaks inside.

Cartooning is a wonderful career, and I'd like more women to get to have it. I can't think of any reason why we won't see more syndicated female cartoonists in the future.

I decided I was going to tell these stories. I went around and met Crumb. He was the cartoonist. I started realizing comics weren't just kid stuff.

I'd have been a filmmaker or a cartoonist or something else which extended from the visual arts into the making of narratives if I hadn't been able to shift into fiction.

Ah, the life of a newspaper cartoonist - how I miss the groupies, drugs and trashed hotel rooms!

When the cartoonist is trying to talk honestly and seriously about life, then I believe he has a responsibility to think beyond satisfying the market's every whim and desire.

Humor is basically a cognitive process. And it's a creative process not only on the part of the cartoonist but on the part of the viewer.

If you want to find out what a writer or a cartoonist really feels, look at his work. That's enough.

Most success springs from an obstacle or failure. I became a cartoonist largely because I failed in my goal of becoming a successful executive.

I'm not sure about that role any longer. The role used to be to mix things up and I think to a great extent it still is, but the quality of the work of the political cartoon has been succeeded by the wisecrack, the gag cartoon, so that the cartoonist becomes more of the equivalent of the Jay Leno monologues, or David Letterman monologues.

Cartoons were very conservative. The country was very conservative. Although the liberals were allegedly in charge for a long time, there was a very acceptable balance what people would talk about in public. And I wanted to stretch those and move further out. And as the civil rights movement began, I started doing cartoons on that and on sit-ins and I was, along with Bill Mauldin, a great cartoonist out of World War II, arguably one of two white cartoonists doing this kind of work, Bill and me.

In many ways, my entire graphic novel career was a long diversion. Originally, all I wanted to do was to be an underground cartoonist and maybe bring out a groovy underground mag.

I do worry that beginning cartoonists could feel somewhat strangled by the increasing critical seriousness comics has received of late and feel, like younger writers, that they have to have something to "say" before they set pen to paper. Many cartoonists feel even more passionate about this idea than I do, vehemently insisting that comics are inherently "non-art" and poop humor or whatever it is they think it is, but that attitude is a little like insisting that all modern writing should always take the form of The Canterbury Tales.

The problem with the future is that it keeps turning into the present.

Weekends don't count unless you spend them doing something completely pointless.

I guess I consider myself a cartoonist first, though I was "trained" as a painter/printmaker/sculptor. If there's still any resistance to cartooning in the nuts-and-bolts world of acquiring the means of survival, it's probably mostly on the pay scale. If graphic novels are selling really well and are "growing the book market" or whatever it is a businessman would say about them, I don't see it in the remuneration offered by some of the publishers.

I quit comics because I got completely sick of it. I was drawing comics all the time and didn't have the time or energy to do anything else. That got to me in the end. I never made enough money from comics to be able to take a break and do something else. Now I just can't stand comics. . . . I wish my work would be recognized by a larger crowd of people as more art than be stuck with the cartoonist label for the rest of my life.

Being a naive 20-something I didn't think that I could just go to the screen cartoonist's union, that I was a member of, and scream bloody murder and they would have jumped all over this guy and said, "Oh, but yes he does get screen credit."

I'm killing time while I wait for life to shower me with meaning and happiness.

I think it's vital to be honest with yourself. You do have to satisfy yourself first. If you're drawing something, you have to ask yourself if it's something you genuinely think is funny. Or is it starting to fall into just a category, just kind of a shtick thing? I think it's important for all cartoonists to be honest with themselves about their own sense of humor and what they're doing.

Traces of nobility, gentleness and courage persist in all people, do what we will to stamp out the trend. So, too, do those characteristics which are ugly. It is just unfortunate that in the clumsy hands of a cartoonist all traits become ridiculous, leading to a certain amount of self-conscious expostulation and the desire to join battle.

So what were Europeans telling their leaders? The general message was perfectly summed up by the cartoonist Chappatte, who drew a group of protesters holding up a placard shouting "Unhappy" - and one of their number shouting through a megaphone into the ballot box. There are 28 member states and 28 varieties of Unhappy.

The cartoonist’s task is not so much to be balanced as to give balance, particularly in situations of disproportionate power relationships such as we see in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

There has always been quite a strong black and white art tradition in Australia, with quite a large contingent of cartoonists, given the size of the population.

As a kid, I knew I wanted to be either a cartoonist or an astronaut. The latter was never much of a possibility, as I don't even like riding in elevators.

Islamic ethics is based on 'limits and proportions,' which means that the answer to an offensive cartoon is a cartoon, not the burning of embassies or the kidnapping of people designated as the enemy. Islam rejects guilt by association. Just as Muslims should not blame all Westerners for the poor taste of a cartoonist who wanted to be offensive, those horrified by the spectacle of rent-a-mob sackings of embassies in the name of Islam should not blame all Muslims for what is an outburst of fascist energy.

If you just write the kinds of stories you think others will want to read, you'll be competing with cartoonists who are far more enthusiastic for that kind of comic than you are, and they'll kick your ass every time.

I think there was a point in the past when I felt that my options as an artist were either to make race a nonissue and deny its impact on life and just say, "Don't think of me as an Asian cartoonist. Just think of me as a cartoonist."

Both of my parents were cartoonists - they met in art school - so I was always drawing and I was the best artist in my class and all that stuff.

Comics are not illustration, any more than fiction is copywriting. Illustration is essentially the application of artistic technique or style to suit a commercial or ancillary purpose; not that cartooning can't be this (see any restaurant giveaway comic book or superhero media property as an example), but comics written and produced by a cartoonist sitting alone by him- or herself are not illustrations. They don't illustrate anything at all, they literally tell a story.

Cartooning at its best is a fine art. I'm a cartoonist who works in the medium of animation, which also allows me to paint my cartoons.

I don't believe in the concept of hell, but if I did I would think of it as filled with people who were cruel to animals.

Alternative cartoonists have to rely on comic book stores to get their stuff in the hands of readers.

I've been doing the 'Sherman's Lagoon' strip for about 18 years, and I was a political cartoonist before that for my hometown paper in Alexandria, Va.

I like the Internet as place to get instant gratification: posting a comic online is the quickest way to get attention for your art, but I have been talking to a lot of younger, aspiring cartoonists who very quickly get discouraged if they aren't getting a lot of attention immediately. This can also be aggravated by artists who appear to be really quickly Tumblr-famous, and get lots of notes on their work.

My father, George, has also affected the choices in my life regarding films. I like films that take chances or say something different or experiment. Growing up with him, I was surrounded by different artists - not just actors or film-makers but cartoonists, poets, writers.

Fortunately, I'm able to make a living from comics, so I'm privileged enough to be quite choosy, though most cartoonists can't afford to be. It's really an uncomfortable situation, since I'm not an illustrator, though I do get calls from morally indefensible businesses offering me money to decorate their ambitions. It's extremely rare, almost unheard of, in fact, that I am asked to do a comic strip. Do writers get calls to pen Toyota advertisements? Do composers get asked to write chamber pieces about exercise machines?

My father was a really sharp cartoonist and filmmaker. He used to tape-record the family surreptitiously, either while we were driving around or at dinner, and in 1963 he and I made up a story about a brother and a sister, Lisa and Matt, having an adventure out in the woods with animals.

The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.

I'm not electronically geared at all; I'm really a 19th century cartoonist. I have a 15-year-old daughter, and what she's attracted to is of course iPod and this pod and that, I mean stuff I don't even begin to know - I never learned how to type for Christ's sake! I can't get in her head and find out what she would do if she had the kind of talent I had, I don't have a clue. Every generation comes up with its own quirkiness and its own culture which gets its inspiration from what's in the air at that time.