An excerpt from a 1981 issue of The Comics Journal discussing pace and money:

Kim Thompson: The catch is that the people who make good money in comic books do so by producing four or five pages a day.

Harvey Kurtzman: God bless! Four or five pages a day… Well, isn’t that kind of sick? I mean, when a man is turning out four pages a day, what’s he doing? Hack! How can you do anything creative at the rate of our pages a day?

Gary Groth: It’s almost a rote action.

Harvey Kurtzman: Exactly. You fill your head with ten formulas and you just rearrange and repeat them again and again. Four pages a day is astonishing to me because I do four pages every two months, and at that I’m slaving. I remember seeing the new generation of comic book people at work, and it was so disappointing. There was a bunch of paper over here and a bunch of pencils over there, and a pencil sharpener. That was it. You could practically hear the machine going, ‘Ba-dum dum, ba-dum dum!’ There’s something very pitiful about an artist working that way… But what do I know?

Kim Thompson: There are certain people in the comics industry, particularly during the past 10 years, who have been much more conscientious and much slower and eventually the economic situation just forces them out because they’re making hardly any money at all. The person who does one page a day gets the same page rate as the person who does five pages a day.

Harvey Kurtzman: Well, that’s what used to happen with me up at EC. I was working on Mad magazine, and my competition was Al Feldstein, doing all of those EC magazines, and he was fast! He just turned that stuff out!

Kim Thompson: A story a day for five years.

Harvey Kurtzman: And I would always be bitching, ‘I don’t get enough money, I don’t get enough money’ and Gaines would hit me with the reasoning, ‘Well, Al turns out more pages and gets more money going.’ And it was a very simple logic that I couldn’t argue with.

“There is but one solution to the intricate riddle of life; to improve ourselves, and contribute to the happiness of others.”

— Mary Shelley

“You should be aggressive with your beauty, and with your art. There are lots of things in the world that are neither artistic or beautiful, and I think that they are endangering and harming our lives on this planet. So, for artists, I think it is your duty, with your art, with your writing, with your music, with your filmmaking, with whatever – now is the moment. Go on the attack. Don’t hold anything back. Be as wonderful and beautiful and artistic as you possibly can, because nothing else is good enough.

Always do your very, very, very best. Try to use your art to do something about the world that you’re in, because that is what art is for. Art of any sort is to modify the human condition. It’s a way of critiquing ourselves. It’s a way of reminding ourselves what the possibilities are. Reminding ourselves what we should be reaching for.

I was reading a quote the other day from somebody…I forget who, but they were saying that it is a big misconception to think that humans invented art. Whereas the truth of it is, art invented humans. We weren’t human before we had art. Art is at the beginning of everything. And I would like to think that it’s still our best way out of these current circumstances. So, artists out there: pull yourselves together, smarten yourselves up, and get to doing the job that you’re meant to be doing.

We’re not simply here to entertain the crowd as they’re being led into the slaughterhouse. That is not what art is for. Art is to wake people up, not to sedate them. So, let that be every artist’s mission.”

— Alan Moore

“I’m not despondent and I haven’t lost heart. Life is everywhere, life is in us ourselves, not outside. There will be people by my side, and to be a human being among people and to remain one forever, no matter in what circumstances, not to grow despondent and not to lose heart — that’s what life is all about, that’s its task. I have come to recognize that. The idea has entered my flesh and blood… The head that created, lived the higher life of art, that recognized and grew accustomed to the higher demands of the spirit, that head has already been cut from my shoulders… But there remain in me a heart and the same flesh and blood that can also love, and suffer, and pity, and remember, and that’s life, too!”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”

— Sylvia Plath

“The will to remake again is not born outside defeat but inside it. Those who endure defeat after defeat with an open face generate forms of knowing that emerge only from exposure, from vulnerability, from standing unshielded before the world.

The defeated of the world theorize what they endure. In truth, the only critical thinking possible today is thinking from the standpoint of the defeated. This standpoint is not one of passivity, nor of victimhood. On the contrary, it asks: How can one think from within brokenness, from within the ruins, and still produce meaning, and even possibility? What does it mean to transform defeat into a method?

What the defeated of the earth share is the understanding that defeat is not the end of struggle but its very condition. For them, defeat becomes a method. Historical consciousness emerges most sharply through it. Defeat exposes what victories obscure. Where victory justifies the rightness of existing arrangements, defeat reveals their wrongness. Defeat is the ground of ethical thought: it forces us to imagine possibilities that cannot yet be realized, and that very act of imagining becomes politically generative. Defeat clears conceptual space for radical imagination.

A pessimistic hope is a hope that drives us to struggle precisely because we recognize the impossibility of victory. Victory may be unrealizable, and yet it must still be imagined. If we cannot escape defeat, then we must learn to think with it. We cannot win, but we must think as if we could, not out of religious conviction or political ideology, but simply because we are still alive. We still breathe. The distinction between optimism and hope lies here: hope persists even in impossibility.”

— Shahram Khosravi (via)

“I learned my first valuable lesson when I was nine years old. I collected Buck Rogers comic strips. I loved Buck Rogers. I thought he was the greatest thing that ever happened in the world. All my friends made fun of me, and I listened to them and I tore all the strips up.

About a month later I burst into tears. I asked myself, ‘Why am I crying?’ The answer was that something was gone from the center of my life. I had allowed other people to use their authority against my taste. The first lesson you have to learn in this world is to go by your own taste. Don’t listen to anyone else. Be what you are with all your heart and soul, because that’s all you’re ever going to have. You have to trust yourself. So I went back to Buck Rogers and said, ‘I love you madly!’ My life was restored, and from then on I never listened to anyone else in the world, because you’re the only person who knows anything about your loves.”

— Ray Bradbury

“I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child, and that if these faculties are encouraged in youth they will act well and wisely in the adult, but if they are repressed and denied in the child they will stunt and cripple the adult personality. And finally, I believe that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination: so that it is our pleasant duty, as librarians, or teachers, or parents, or writers, or simply as grown-ups, to encourage that faculty of imagination in our children, to encourage it to grow freely, to flourish like the green bay tree, by giving it the best, absolutely the best and purest, nourishment that it can absorb. And never, under any circumstances, to squelch it, or sneer at it, or imply that it is childish, or unmanly, or untrue.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin