“For the first half of my career I was concerned with discovering as many things as possible to put into my stories — rendering, texture, detail. You’re learning, you’re reaching out for all kinds of things to put into your work… to enrich it… For the second half of my career, I have worked as hard as I could to leave out all those things. It’s only after you’ve reached a certain age or maturity that suddenly you start to look at it in a different way, and you say, ‘There’s too much going on in there that doesn’t need to be there. Now, how do you leave out the right thing — that’s the secret of it.'”

— Alex Toth

“I’ve just learned from the history of the past few years, and looking farther back, from history as a whole, that one should not overestimate the impact or effect that one individual can have. Fundamentally the powerful, unseen, plutonic forces in the depths are at work, and they are decisive, and in the end everything straightens itself out, so to speak, “of its own accord.” Don’t get me wrong. I’m not pronouncing my word in favor of a cheap, fatalistic optimism, which only seeks to veil its impotence, the kind of outlook that, precisely in the case of your esteemed spouse [Karl Kautsky], is so hateful to me. No, no, l am ready at my post at all times and at the first opportunity will begin striking the keys of World History’s piano with all ten fingers so that it will really boom. But since right now I happen to be “on leave” from World History, not through any fault of my own but because of external compulsion, I just laugh to myself and rejoice that things are moving ahead without me, and I believe with rock-hard certainty that all will go well. History always knows how to manage for the best even when it seems to have run into a blind alley of the most hopeless kind.

Dearest, when one has the bad habit of looking for a drop of poison in any blossom, one finds good reason, as long as one lives, to be moaning and groaning. If you take the opposite approach, and look for the honey in every blossom, then you’ll always find reason to be cheerful. Besides, believe me, the time that I—and others as well—spend behind bars, under lock and key, will not be in vain. In the great overall settling of accounts this too will somehow prove to be of value. I am of the opinion that one should, without trying to be too crafty or racking one’s brains too much, simply live the way one feels is right and not always expect to be repaid immediately with cash in hand. Everything will come out right in the end. And if not—to me it’s all the same. I say “oh well”; either way, l am enjoying life so much, every morning I thoroughly inspect the condition of the buds on all my bushes, and every day I visit a little red ladybug with two black spots on its back, which in spite of the wind and the cold, I have been keeping alive for a week on a little bough warmly surrounded by cotton wool, and I observe the clouds, how they are constantly being renewed and becoming ever more beautiful, and—on the whole I feel that I am no more important than the ladybug and I am inexpressibly happy with this sense of my insignificance.”

— Rosa Luxemburg (letter from prison, April 15, 1917)

“You have to decide what the word “success” means. What is success? I’ve got four issues of Tyrant now that I can show people. The reaction from most people who aren’t into comics is, they’ll look through it, and they’ll dig it just from the hit they get off the drawing, and they’ll go, “Are you going to make a movie?” In America, that means success. You’re on TV, or you made a movie.

Success to me — and I’ll tell you exactly what it is to me. My kids are healthy, and when I get up at 6:00 a.m., there is as little distraction between me and my drawing board as possible. And really, if all I have to do for the next 15 years is Tyrant, and my kids grow up okay, that’s success. Who cares how much money I do or don’t make? If it’s enough to make ends meet, then I get my next issue out, and that’s all that matters to me. I’m saying Tyrant because that’s my project.

I would say to any cartoonist: If there’s something you really want to do, the success you should aim for is, ‘How can I have it so that’s all I have to do every day?'”

— Stephen R. Bissette (via)

“If people are crying about the dearth of good work, one thing they should do is actively support the good work. This is the way you should be in your whole life: you should go out of your way and be inconvenienced to do things that are right. That includes the environment and everything else. But just in comics, which is all we’re talking about, go out and find the good comics, and if you can’t find it, mail away for it. If your retailer won’t stock it – fuck them. Do your business elsewhere or put your money directly into the publisher’s hands. Fantagraphics, Kitchen Sink… anybody putting out good stuff.

Another thing people should do is do their own stuff. We need more people doing their own mini-comics. Stop griping and bitching! And even if you can’t make money on it, you don’t have to have it in staples, just make a fucking mini-comic, put it together, send it out, and eventually you’ll network with people and one day you’ll get work doing something you really care for… Like Mike Watt from fIREHOSE says: “Go form your own fucking band.” Support each other. I guess that’s it.”

— Evan Dorkin (via)

“Sandman Mystery Theater is the series that taught me the most about discipline as an artist. When you’re doing your own book, you’re your own boss. When you’re missing your deadlines, you’re just hurting yourself – well, yourself and your publisher. But with Sandman Mystery Theater, they would have tossed me and got someone else. So I had to make decisions on layouts and finishes, and I had to get them done for the deadline. It wasn’t like, ‘Should I ink it this way? Nah, let me try it this way.’ It was, ‘I’m inking it this way. If it’s wrong, I’ll do it better next time.’ I wasn’t hacking it out. I was putting thought behind it, but I was having to make the decisions right then and there and move on. I made tons of mistakes. I cringe looking at Mystery Theater every time I see the reprints that are coming out now, but it was a very fast, harsh schedule, especially once I started doing more of them.”

— Guy Davis (via)

“The Surrealists handed out leaflets in the streets before every new project and assured everybody that they, too, could be artists if they would only release the hidden creativity in their own unconscious minds.”

— Helena Lewis, The Politics of Surrealism

“The artist’s imagination wards off the despair of the world; creation affords man the possibility of inventing his own future, of imagining his own world and celebrating a ritual which brings him close to the collective unconscious.”

— Michel Ciment

“Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape? The moneylenders, the know-nothings, the authoritarians have us all in prison; if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin