Quotes about comics

A collection of quotes on the topic of comic, comics, likeness, doing.

Quotes about comics

Osamu Tezuka photo

“I am convinced that comics should not only make people laugh. For this in my stories found tears, anger, hatred, pain and end not always happy.”

Osamu Tezuka (1928–1989) Japanese cartoonist and animator

Quoted in Helen McCarthy, Osamu Tezuka: God of manga , translated by Fabio Deotto, Edizioni BD, 2010, back cover.

Elvis Presley photo

“When I was a child, ladies and gentlemen, I was a dreamer. I read comic books, and I was the hero of the comic book. I saw movies, and I was the hero in the movie. So every dream I ever dreamed, has come true a hundred times…”

Elvis Presley (1935–1977) American singer and actor

Acceptance speech for the 1970 Ten Outstanding Young Men of the Nation Award (16 January 1971), published in Elvis — Word for Word: What He Said, Exactly As He Said It (1999) by Jerry Osborne, p. 188
Context: I'd like to thank the Jaycees for electing me as one of their outstanding young men. When I was a child, ladies and gentlemen, I was a dreamer. I read comic books, and I was the hero of the comic book. I saw movies, and I was the hero in the movie. So every dream I ever dreamed, has come true a hundred times... And these gentlemen over here, these are the type of people who care, they're dedicated, and they realize that it is possible that they might be building the kingdom of heaven, it's not just too far fetched, from reality. I'd like to say that I learned very early in life that "Without a song, the day would never end; without a song, a man ain't got a friend; without a song, the road would never bend — without a song." So I keep singing a song. Goodnight. Thank you.

Stan Lee photo

“As comics writers we had to have villains in our stories. And once World War II started, the Nazis gave us the greatest villains in the world to fight against. It was a slam dunk.”

Stan Lee (1922–2018) American comic book writer

How the Jews Created the Comic Book Industry Part I: The Golden Age (1933-1955) Reform Judaism http://reformjudaismmag.net/03fall/comics.shtml (2003)

George Santayana photo
Edward Said photo
Osamu Tezuka photo
George Orwell photo
Anne Frank photo

“I am what a romantic movie is to a profound thinker - a mere diversion, a comic interlude, something that is soon forgotten.”

Anne Frank (1929–1945) victim of the Holocaust and author of a diary

Source: The Diary of a Young Girl

Katharine Hepburn photo
Vladimir Nabokov photo

“Only one letter divides the comic from the cosmic.”

Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor
Nora Ephron photo
Novalis photo

“Humanity is a comic role.”

Novalis (1772–1801) German poet and writer

Source: Novalis: Philosophical Writings

Art Spiegelman photo

“Comics are a gateway drug to literacy.”

Art Spiegelman (1948) cartoonist from the United States
Chuck Dixon photo
Osamu Tezuka photo

“Comics are an international language, they can cross boundaries and generations. Comics are a bridge between all cultures”

Osamu Tezuka (1928–1989) Japanese cartoonist and animator

As quoted in Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1441185755 p. 5

Osamu Tezuka photo
Osamu Tezuka photo
Osamu Tezuka photo

“I first followed the comics of Tagawa Suihō and Yokoyama Ryūichi. But suddenly, once I became devoted to Disney, I set out to copy and master that stuffed-animal style, eventually ending up with how I now draw.”

Osamu Tezuka (1928–1989) Japanese cartoonist and animator

Source: http://www.tcj.com/tezuka-osamu-and-american-comics/ Tezuka Osamu and American Comics

Ted Bundy photo

“I'm not guilty? [Laughs] Does that include the time I stole a comic book when I was five years old? I'm not guilty of the charges which have been filed against me.”

Ted Bundy (1946–1989) American serial killer

1977 interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEWsxCrMM1U in Pitkin County Prison, Colorado

Neil Gaiman photo
H.P. Lovecraft photo
William Moulton Marston photo
Osamu Tezuka photo
Stan Lee photo
Jerry Sadowitz photo

“My idea of Comic Relief is switching Victoria Wood off.”

Jerry Sadowitz (1961) Scottish comedian

The Pall-Bearer's Revue (1992)

Imre Kertész photo
Slavoj Žižek photo

“Darcy wants to present himself to Elizabeth as a proud gentleman, and he gets from her the message 'your pride is nothing but contemptible arrogance.' After the break in their relationship each discovers, through a series of accidents, the true nature of the other - she the sensitive and tender nature of Darcy, he her real dignity and wit - and the novel ends as it should, with their marriage. The theoretical interest of this story lies in the fact that the failure of their first encounter, the double misrecognition concerning the real nature of the other, functions as a positive condition of the final outcome: we cannot say 'if, from the very beginning, she had recognized his real nature and he hers, their story could have ended at once with their marriage.' Let us take a comical hypothesis that the first encounter of the future lovers was a success - that Elizabeth had accepted Darcy's first proposal. What would happen? Instead of being bound together in true love they would become a vulgar everyday couple, a liaison of an arrogant, rich man and a pretentious, every-minded young girl… If we want to spare ourselves the painful roundabout route through the misrecognition, we miss the truth itself: only the working-through of the misrecognition allows us to accede to the true nature of the other and at the same time to overcome our own deficiency - for Darcy, to free himself of his false pride; for Elizabeth, to get rid of her prejudices.”

67
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

Lucian photo
Osamu Tezuka photo
Socrates photo
Whoopi Goldberg photo

“I'm an actor. That's what I do. I'm not a stand-up comic. I do characters. I'm very good. I'll be better. But right now I'm a very good actor.”

Whoopi Goldberg (1955) American actress

As quoted in "Whoopi Goldberg, A One-Woman Character Parade" https://www.newspapers.com/image/?clipping_id=68252476 by Michael Kuchwara, AP Drama Writer, The Fremont News-Messenger (November 29, 1984), p. 31.

Richelle Mead photo
Milan Kundera photo
Mercedes Lackey photo

“I hope some historian will confirm that I was the first cartoonist to use the word 'booger' in a newspaper comic strip.”

Bill Watterson (1958) American comic artist

Source: The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book

Jonathan Stroud photo
Mark Waid photo
Comte de Lautréamont photo
Edith Wharton photo

“There's nothing grimmer than the tragedy that wears a comic mask.”

Edith Wharton (1862–1937) American novelist, short story writer, designer
Richelle Mead photo
Alan Moore photo

“To paint comic books as childish and illiterate is lazy. A lot of comic books are very literate — unlike most films.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/alan-moore-the-reluctant-hero-64407.html
Context: If I write a crappy comic book, it doesn't cost the budget of an emergent Third World nation. When you've got these kinds of sums involved in creating another two hours of entertainment for Western teenagers, I feel it crosses the line from being merely distasteful to being wrong. To paint comic books as childish and illiterate is lazy. A lot of comic books are very literate — unlike most films.

Louisa May Alcott photo
Elizabeth Gilbert photo
Lev Grossman photo
Richelle Mead photo
Flannery O’Connor photo
Alison Bechdel photo

“I'd been upstaged, demoted from protagonist in my own drama to comic relief in my parents' tragedy”

Alison Bechdel (1960) American cartoonist, author

Source: Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Sherrilyn Kenyon photo
Jeannette Walls photo
Alan Moore photo
Alan Moore photo

“Life isn’t divided into genres. It’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

"The Mustard magazine interview" (January 2005)
Context: Life isn’t divided into genres. It’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky.

Charles Stross photo
Ernest Hemingway photo
Henry Fielding photo
Paul Dini photo
Amir Taheri photo
Henry James photo
William Shatner photo

“My being Jewish does not inform the things I do, necessarily. 'Exodus' is a wonderful piece, no matter what religion you are. 'The Shiva Club,' which is a movie I am attempting to make sometime soon, is about crashing a shiva, if you will. A couple of comics crash a shiva. I could have, I suppose, made it an Irish wake, but the shiva I was more familiar with.”

William Shatner (1931) Canadian actor, musician, recording artist, author, and film director

Of his album telling the story of the Exodus, "Beam Me Up Moses William Shatner Album Tells Exodus Story In Spoken Word, Song https://archive.is/20130103131701/www.jweekly.com/article/full/34780/beam-me-up-moses-william-shatner-album-tells-exodus-story-in-spoken-word-so/, Jweekly 18 April 2008.

Will Eisner photo
Menina Fortunato photo
Shane Claiborne photo
Amit Chaudhuri photo

“… "shagging" - a quasi-comical activity, like belching or farting, except it was more taboo and more necessary than these.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

Friend of My Youth (2017)

Noam Chomsky photo

“In Somalia, we know exactly what they had to gain because they told us. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Colin Powell, described this as the best public relations operation of the Pentagon that he could imagine. His picture, which I think is plausible, is that there was a problem about raising the Pentagon budget, and they needed something that would be, look like a kind of a cakewalk, which would give a lot of prestige to the Pentagon. Somalia looked easy. Let's look back at the background. For years, the United States had supported a really brutal dictator, who had just devastated the country, and was finally kicked out. After he's kicked out, it was 1990, the country sank into total chaos and disaster, with starvation and warfare and all kind of horrible misery. The United States refused to, certainly to pay reparations, but even to look. By the middle of 1992, it was beginning to ease. The fighting was dying down, food supplies were beginning to get in, the Red Cross was getting in, roughly 80% of their supplies they said. There was a harvest on the way. It looked like it was finally sort of settling down. At that point, all of a sudden, George Bush announced that he had been watching these heartbreaking pictures on television, on Thanksgiving, and we had to do something, we had to send in humanitarian aid. The Marines landed, in a landing which was so comical, that even the media couldn't keep a straight face. Take a look at the reports of the landing of the Marines, it must've been the first week of December 1992. They had planned a night, there was nothing that was going on, but they planned a night landing, so you could show off all the fancy new night vision equipment and so on. Of course they had called the television stations, because what's the point of a PR operation for the Pentagon if there's no one to look for it. So the television stations were all there, with their bright lights and that sort of thing, and as the Marines were coming ashore they were blinded by the television light. So they had to send people out to get the cameramen to turn off the lights, so they could land with their fancy new equipment. As I say, even the media could not keep a straight face on this one, and they reported it pretty accurately. Also reported the PR aspect. Well the idea was, you could get some nice shots of Marine colonels handing out peanut butter sandwiches to starving refugees, and that'd all look great. And so it looked for a couple of weeks, until things started to get unpleasant. As things started to get unpleasant, the United States responded with what's called the Powell Doctrine. The United States has an unusual military doctrine, it's one of the reasons why the U. S. is generally disqualified from peace keeping operations that involve civilians, again, this has to do with sovereignty. U. S. military doctrine is that U. S. soldiers are not permitted to come under any threat. That's not true for other countries. So countries like, say, Canada, the Fiji Islands, Pakistan, Norway, their soldiers are coming under threat all the time. The peace keepers in southern Lebanon for example, are being attacked by Israeli soldiers all the time, and have suffered plenty of casualties, and they don't like it. But U. S. soldiers are not permitted to come under any threat, so when Somali teenagers started shaking fists at them, and more, they came back with massive fire power, and that led to a massacre. According to the U. S., I don't know the actual numbers, but according to U. S. government, about 7 to 10 thousand Somali civilians were killed before this was over. There's a close analysis of all of this by Alex de Waal, who's one of the world's leading specialists on African famine and relief, altogether academic specialist. His estimate is that the number of people saved by the intervention and the number killed by the intervention was approximately in the same ballpark. That's Somalia. That's what's given as a stellar example of the humanitarian intervention.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Responding to the question, "what did the United States have to gain by intervening in Somalia?", regarding Operation Provide Relief/Operation Restore Hope/Battle of Mogadishu.
Quotes 1990s, 1995-1999, Sovereignty and World Order, 1999

“I was a born club comic. Radio and TV and stage were fine, but I found my real home in cabaret.”

Bob Monkhouse (1928–2003) English entertainer

Obituary in The Independent http://web.archive.org/web/20100507114758/http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/bob-monkhouse-549171.html

Bruce Timm photo
Art Spiegelman photo

“Comics seem to be cooking these days. It's like being a rock star.”

Art Spiegelman (1948) cartoonist from the United States

As quoted in "Breakfast with the FT: Art Spiegelman 'Drawn from Memory'" in Financial Times (29 November 2008).

Douglas Coupland photo
Arthur C. Clarke photo
William Moulton Marston photo

“The picture story fantasy cuts loose the hampering debris of art and artifice and touches the tender spots of universal human desires and aspirations. Comics speak, without qualm or sophistication to the innermost ears of the wishful self.”

William Moulton Marston (1893–1947) American psychologist, lawyer, inventor and comic book writer

"Why 100,000,000 Americans Read Comics", The American Scholar, 13.1 (1943): pp 35-44. as quoted in The Ages of Wonder Woman: Essays on the Amazon Princess in Changing Times, edited by Joeph J Darowski, p.9; in the essay "William Marston's Feminist Agenda" by Michelle R. Finn,

Grant Morrison photo
Richard Rodríguez photo

“Thud. My eyes are open. It is four-thirty in the morning, one morning, and my dry eyes click in their sockets, awake before the birds. There is no light. The eye strains for logic, some play of form. I have been dreaming of wind. The tree outside my window stands silent. I listen to the breathing of the man lying beside me. I know where I am. I am awake. I am alive. Am I tethered to earth only by this fragile breath? A strawful of breath at best. Yet this is the breath that patients beg, their hands gripping the edges of mattresses; this is the breath that wrestles trees, that brings down all the leaves in the Third Act. We know where the car is parked. We know, word-for-word, the texts of plays. We have spoken, in proximity to one another, over years, sentences, hundreds of thousands of sentences—bright, grave, fallible, comic, perishable—perhaps eternal? I don’t know. Where does the wind go? When will the light come? We will have hotcakes for breakfast. How can I protect this...? My church teaches me I cannot. And I believe it. I turn the pillow to its cool side. Then rage fills me, against the cubist necessity of having to arrange myself comically against orthodoxy, against having to wonder if I will offend, against theology that devises that my feeling for him, more than for myself, is a vanity. My brown paradox: The church that taught me to understand love, the church that taught me well to believe love breathes—also tells me it is not love I feel, at four in the morning, in the dark, even before the birds cry. Of every hue and caste am I.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

Nick Cave photo
Brad Garrett photo

“The goons needed some comic relief, and I needed an audience. I had found my niche.”

Brad Garrett (1960) actor, comedian, voice actor

When the Balls Drop https://books.google.com/books?idlLydBAAAQBAJ&pgPT0 (2015), Chapter 2, "Jews Don't Dribble."

Frank Miller photo

“In the world of comic books, "troublemaker" means someone who has some sense of dignity.”

Frank Miller (1957) American writer, artist, film director

Source: Eisner/Miller (2005), p. 198

Sinclair Lewis photo
Roy Lichtenstein photo
George Steiner photo

“The Socratic demonstration of the ultimate unity of tragic and comic drama is forever lost. But the proof is in the art of Chekhov.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

Source: The Death of Tragedy (1961), Ch. VIII (p. 302).

Conor Oberst photo
Stephen King photo
Peter Medawar photo
Nathan Lane photo
Johannes Grenzfurthner photo
Dave Sim photo

“…there is very little about self-publishing a comic book that can be taught, but everything about it can be learned.”

Dave Sim (1956) Canadian cartoonist, creator of Cerebus

Source: Cerebus Guide to Self-Publishing (1997), p. 21

Alan Moore photo
Gary Gygax photo
Gottfried Helnwein photo
Doug Stanhope photo

“Complaining that a comic is drunk is like going to a titty bar and complaining because your lapdancer is a communist.”

Doug Stanhope (1967) American stand-up comedian, actor, and author

Deadbeat Hero (2004)

Grant Morrison photo
Michael Moore photo

“I stopped reading the comics page a long time ago. It seems that whoever is in charge of what to put on that page is given an edict that states: “For God’s sake, try to be as bland as possible and by no means offend any one!” Thus, whenever something like Doonesbury would come along, it would be continually censored and, if lucky, eventually banished to the editorial pages. The message was clear: Keep it simple, keep it cute, and don’t be challenging, outrageous or political.
And keep it white!
It’s odd that considering all the black ink that goes into making the comics section (and color on Sundays) that you rarely see any black faces on that page. Well, maybe it’s not so odd after all, considering the makeup of most newsrooms in our country. It is even more stunning when you consider that in many of our large cities like New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago where the white population is barely a third of the overall citizenry, the comics pages seem to be one of the last vestiges of the belief that white faces are just…well, you know…so much more happy and friendly and funny!
Of course, the real funnies are on the front pages of most papers these days. That’s where you can see a lot of black faces. The media loves to cover black people on the front page. After all, when you live in a society that will lock up 30 percent of all black men at some time in their lives and send more of them to prison than to college, chances are a fair number of those black faces will end up in the newspaper.
Oops, there I go playing the race card. You see, in America these days, we aren’t supposed to talk about race. We have been told to pretend that things have gotten better, that the old days of segregation and cross burnings are long gone, and that no one needs to talk about race again because, hey, we fixed that problem.
Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Sure, the “whites only” signs are down, but they have just been replaced by invisible ones that, if you are black, you see hanging in front of the home loan department of the local bank, across the entrance of the ritzy suburban or on the doors of the U. S. Senate”

Michael Moore (1954) American filmmaker, author, social critic, and liberal activist

100 percent Caucasian and going strong!
Foreword to "The Boondocks Treasury: a Right to be Hostile" by Aaron McGruder, (2003).
2003

Miguel de Unamuno photo