“The process involves reaching the point of not trying any more to dig inside, but just letting go, ceding control… And at the point of giving up I’m suddenly alive again. It’s like jumping resignedly into the abyss and discovering that you can just drift dreamily on air currents.”
— Brian Eno
“Listening is an act of community, which takes space, time, and silence.
Reading is a means of listening.
Reading is not as passive as hearing or viewing.
It’s an act: you do it. You read at your pace, your own speed, not the ceaseless, incoherent, gabbling, shouting rush of the media. You take in what you can and want to take in, not what they shove at you fast and hard and loud in order to overwhelm and control you. Reading a story, you may be told something, but you’re not being sold anything. And though you’re usually alone when you read, you are in communion with another mind. You aren’t being brainwashed or co-opted or used; you’ve joined in an act of the imagination.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin
“Love and Rockets is the last step. I ‘made it’ when we did the first issue. Everything else – The New York Times, even making a movie – is lesser than Love and Rockets, as far as I’m concerned, and everyone else should treat their [own] work that way.”
— Jaime Hernandez
“Human beings appear to be the only mortal finite beings who wish to transcend their finitude. Thus they are the only emotional beings who wish not to be emotional, who wish to withhold these acknowledgments of neediness and to design for themselves a life in which these acknowledgments have no place. This means that they frequently learn to reject their own vulnerability and to suppress awareness of the attachments that entail it. We might also say that they are the only animals for whom neediness is a source of shame, and who take pride in themselves to the extent to which they have allegedly gotten clear of vulnerability.”
— Martha Nussbaum
“I condemn and deplore the violence of poverty and the injustice of hatred and the violence of absolute injustice that makes the peaceful conduct of our days impossible or cowardly.”
— June Jordan
“Maybe that’s why I write—in a journal. That feels “right.” I know I’m alone, that I’m the only reader of what I write here—but the knowledge isn’t painful, on the contrary I feel stronger for it, stronger each time I write something down. (Hence my worry this past year—I felt myself terribly weakened by the fact that I couldn’t write in the journal, didn’t want to, was blocked, or whatever.) I can’t talk to myself, but I can write to myself.”
— Susan Sontag
“In the realm of art … we can fulfill our expectations only by learning which authors disappoint and which authors offer the true nourishment for the soul. We find out who the good writers are, and then we look or wait for their next book. Such writers — living or dead, whatever genre they write in, critically fashionable or not, academically approved or not — are those who not only meet our expectations but surpass them. That is the gift the great storytellers have. They tell the same stories over and over (how many stories are there?), but when they tell them they are new, they are news, they renew us, they show us the world made new.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin
“When it comes to my work, it’s all one story, and it’s none of my business what that story is. I don’t mean that sarcastically. I’m not saying that my opinions are less important than other people’s. I just think that, after a certain point, the work takes on a life of its own, and whether I like it or not doesn’t really matter.
I respect the person who was doing these books then, even though now I would go back and redraw them completely differently. I have compassion for things I did that don’t work. I see them as examples that can encourage other artists. You might think that you’ll never be the fastest, or the most realistic, or the most skilled artist, but there’s a home for you out there, whoever you are. My career is proof that you can get into the system, find a tiny home off in a corner, and prosper.
Some might claim that I’m too young to be saying this, but I’m at a point in my life where I’m thinking a lot about how I want to spend my remaining time. Should I go off into semiretirement and not do anything more than sketches and covers for fun? Or should I keep chasing the big projects? How do you know if you’re doing something that would best be left at the bottom of the sea? Should you take these 20 coconuts, weave them together in a net, and throw them out into the ocean, or not? I think the ocean will be just fine either way. Frankly, it probably doesn’t matter one way or the other. It’s kind of freeing if you can get there.
It was pure fate that allowed me to get to some of these places; I’m just a goofball who stumbled into a couple of things. Yes, once it happened to me, I tried to make something of it, but it could just as easily have been someone else.
Humility and suffering are good things. They keep my head from swelling up too much. Although I may sound self-deprecating, there has to be a layer of narcissism underneath or else I couldn’t keep working.
I need to be careful with my self-deprecation. If I’m impatient with myself, that’s one thing, but if you, the reader, tell me that you like something I’ve done, I need to stand back and respect that. My opinions are to be disregarded. Your first impression about my work is more important than anything that’s in this introduction.”
— Sam Kieth, 2018
A few quotes from Alan Moore, via Magic Words:
“You can’t buy that empowerment. To just know that as far as you are aware, you have not got a price; that there is not an amount of money large enough to make you compromise even a tiny bit of principle that, as it turned out, would make no practical difference anyway. I’d advise everyone to do it, otherwise you’re going to end up mastered by money and that’s not a thing you want ruling your life.”
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“Possibly because of my own background, age and prejudices, I believe that something funny, lovely and informative that is available to everyone without the need for a device or internet connection is the option which, to me, makes most sense both emotionally and ethically.”
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“Illuminate your little patch of ground, the people that you know, the things that you want to commemorate. Light them up with your art, with your music, with your writing, with whatever it is that you do. Do that, and little by little it might gradually get to be, if not a better world, then a better understood world.”
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“I’m not interested in traveling. I’m all over the world in my head, I’m everywhere. I’m not very often where I actually am, so I don’t really have to move.”
“The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light.”
— James Baldwin
