Adrian Tomine Quotes

For a long time, I was very resistant to the idea of online publication or even e-books or something like that.

Maybe you're not even in a position to really judge how good your kid is at that endeavor.

Fortunately, I've never had to be too critical of my own work, because the world is critical enough.

There were certainly some people who wanted me to do a feel-good story that affirmed a lot of very commonly held beliefs.

I grew up with a very romantic, idealized vision of New York, probably because of all the books I read and the movies I watched.

I used to live in Chris Rock's former apartment. I've got some junk mail for him if he wants it.

I had a mundane, happy childhood, without much struggle.

'Shortcomings' was me figuring out who I am.

I think the response I get to one 'New Yorker' cover outweighs five books that I publish.

Ninety percent of the time when I'm working, there's this very palpable sensation that I'm doing everything wrong and should just give up.

The most impactful comics that I've read are the ones where the artists swung for the bleachers and tried to immerse you in their world.

A lot of my fears come out in my work rather than life.

I was just taking my sketchbook to Kinko's and making photocopies and hand-assembling them - folding them over and stapling them.

Readers often bring a different set of criteria to the work based on the format.

It's important to make a distinction between becoming more precise and becoming better.

I wanted to be as invisible as possible as an artist. I wanted to differentiate between myself and who I'm writing about.

I wanted it to be as readable as possible. I had the ambition of reaching a broader audience.

It's absolutely chilling to think that I've been working on a comic-book series called 'Optic Nerve' since I was sixteen.

I started publishing my comic while I was still living with my parents.

I'm getting to a point in my life where my whole attitude about the relationship between myself and the audience is totally different.

When I'm sitting at my drafting table in my studio, I could really be anywhere.

I wanted all the responsibility to rest on the content of the story. I tried to make the visual style almost invisible.

I think that if you are looking at a comic that's made by one person, that there's just a level of intimacy that I don't really see anywhere else.

You start to get nervous when the value of a comic book or graphic novel is relative to the achievements of some other medium.

It's a strange thing to be a so-called alternative cartoonist, because in the early part of my career, I was really tethered to the superhero world.

IT'S COLD WATER IN THE FACE TO REALIZE YOU'RE NOT NEARLY AS SPECIAL AND AS UNUSUAL AS YOU MIGHT HAVE THOUGHT WHEN YOU WERE AN ALIENATED TEENAGER.

My 20s were peaceful, privileged, but still I felt the desire to write angsty dramas.

One of the by-products of being allowed to start my professional career prematurely is that the evolution of my work is really evident.

When email and the Internet came along, I never publish an email address. I just stuck with this P.O. Box address.

To be perfectly honest, if it was up to me, I would be invisible as an artist.

I think when I finally got it in my head that I was going to do the story, I wanted to avoid doing what I thought people wanted me to do.

All my stories take place on the West Coast - not the beach, but smaller inland towns. I feel homesick, and I find inspiration in capturing that.

I was just a guy who did adult or alternative comic books. And then suddenly to be, like, a New Yorker cover artist was a different thing.

A lot of the qualities in 'Killing and Dying' is sort of a response to work I'd done previously. I wanted to push myself in some different directions.

The comics work is very slow, and it basically involves working for sometimes years in isolation and not knowing how the work is going to be received.

THE EXPERIENCE OF READING A COMIC SHOULD NOT BE THE TIME IT TAKES TO TURN EACH PAGE.

I'm always a little apprehensive about 'decoding' fictional stories.

I intentionally approached each story in 'Killing and Dying' in a different way, and that includes the writing process.

There's never been a moment where I sat down at my drawing board and thought, 'I'm a pro!'

I would honestly be elated if I could wave a magic wand and eradicate my back catalog and then have a fresh crack at some of those ideas.

'Peanuts' is a life-long influence, going back to before I could even read.

I think having kids has been the biggest influence on my work since I started publishing.

I'm sometimes a cartoonist, and there's an audience for that, and I'm sometimes an illustrator, and there's an audience for that.

I've always published a range of responses to my work in the letters section of my comic book.

I'm an unabashed fan of 'The New Yorker.' I do feel proud when I see my artwork in there.