Top 100 Adrian Tomine Quotes
#1. 'Peanuts' is a life-long influence, going back to before I could even read.
Adrian Tomine
#2. When I'm sitting at my drafting table in my studio, I could really be anywhere.
Adrian Tomine
#3. Maybe you're not even in a position to really judge how good your kid is at that endeavor.
Adrian Tomine
#4. I had a mundane, happy childhood, without much struggle.
Adrian Tomine
#5. I wanted to try to create characters that happen to be Asian but who are pretty different from those we generally see in our culture, in our commercial culture.
Adrian Tomine
#6. I really love New York, but I have to say, the humidity during the summer is a nightmare for a cartoonist. Not only am I sweating in my studio, my bristol board is curling up, the drafting tape is peeling off the board, my Rapidograph pens bleed the minute I put them to paper ... it's a disaster.
Adrian Tomine
#7. There's a part of me that feels like it gets really frustrating to keep working in the manner that I made the book 'Shortcomings,' where everything is pretty accurate to the real world.
Adrian Tomine
#8. A lot of my fears come out in my work rather than life.
Adrian Tomine
#9. My early comics are really reflective of being kind of a befuddled, single loser in the Bay Area, and I think having kids has been by far the most profound impact on me as a person and as an artist.
Adrian Tomine
#10. When I started publishing my work, one of the biggest surprises to me was the recurring question about my background and why I wasn't doing more stories about Asian-Americans.
Adrian Tomine
#11. I wanted it to be as readable as possible. I had the ambition of reaching a broader audience.
Adrian Tomine
#12. I think having kids has been the biggest influence on my work since I started publishing.
Adrian Tomine
#13. It's psychologically a weird experience to be so aware of the fact that the real time of your life is moving much faster than the fictional time you're trying to depict. You start to feel very weighted down sometimes.
Adrian Tomine
#14. 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.
Adrian Tomine
#15. I'm not the best person to analyze any kind of evolution in my work, but I do feel like it's been an ongoing struggle to basically teach myself how to tell the kinds of stories that interest me in comics form.
Adrian Tomine
#16. I wanted to be as invisible as possible as an artist. I wanted to differentiate between myself and who I'm writing about.
Adrian Tomine
#17. I'm not the kind of person who would throw himself into some exciting or dangerous situation just to get material. So I tend to go about my normal, boring life and just try to look at things a little more closely.
Adrian Tomine
#18. I think it's nice if someone respects whatever their endeavor is, whether it's dance or art or stand-up comedy, to not assume that they're gonna be an overnight sensation, that it's this great craft that takes a lot of hard work to get good at.
Adrian Tomine
#19. I feel like if people are going to go to the effort to get a stamp and, you know, put it on an envelope that, you know, it's a big effort these days. So I often write back.
Adrian Tomine
#20. I started my career so early and developed in print for better or for worse, so I think there's a sense some of my earliest readers are kind of copilots on this voyage with me.
Adrian Tomine
#21. On a very basic, concrete level, there have been times when my work, regardless of the content, has harmed relationships because I made that work such a primary priority in my life.
Adrian Tomine
#22. 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.
Adrian Tomine
#23. 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.
Adrian Tomine
#24. A lot of the kinship that people notice is not coincidental. I was very impressionable and trying to find my role models when I was twelve or thirteen.
Adrian Tomine
#25. 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.
Adrian Tomine
#26. I think a lot of the bells and whistles that become available to you would be impossible to resist for some people, so it's just never going to be a real stand-in version of your comic. People will have to take advantage of the ability to have sound, or zoom in and out, whatever it is.
Adrian Tomine
#27. 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.
Adrian Tomine
#28. I think there was a point in the past when I felt that my options as an artist were either to make race a nonissue and deny its impact on life and just say, "Don't think of me as an Asian cartoonist. Just think of me as a cartoonist."
Adrian Tomine
#29. I think, to its credit, this is one of the last forms of popular entertainment that I don't sense to be discriminatory in any way. I think there's this general hunger for greater diversity, where publishers are really excited about finding different voices than what has been done.
Adrian Tomine
#30. I used to live in Chris Rock's former apartment. I've got some junk mail for him if he wants it.
Adrian Tomine
#31. THE EXPERIENCE OF READING A COMIC SHOULD NOT BE THE TIME IT TAKES TO TURN EACH PAGE.
Adrian Tomine
#32. What was a very private childhood hobby turned into a very a public, professional job, and I think that there's a lot of inhibition that can grow from that.
Adrian Tomine
#33. For a long time, I was very resistant to the idea of online publication or even e-books or something like that.
Adrian Tomine
#34. I wanted all the responsibility to rest on the content of the story. I tried to make the visual style almost invisible.
Adrian Tomine
#35. 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.
Adrian Tomine
#36. There's never been a moment where I sat down at my drawing board and thought, 'I'm a pro!'
Adrian Tomine
#37. There have been a handful of assignments over the years that I've had to turn down due to time constraints, and I was fairly envious when I saw the finished product, beautifully illustrated by someone else.
Adrian Tomine
#38. I do think it's getting more and more rare in this country to raise a kid with the attitude that creativity is something valuable. The idea of trying to make the effort to produce something, to put something out into the world, rather than just taking in all the stuff the world's putting out at you.
Adrian Tomine
#39. In general, daily strips were just a regular part of my childhood. So even if I wasn't a huge fan of most of those strips, I still read them religiously every morning while I ate my cereal.
Adrian Tomine
#40. 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.
Adrian Tomine
#41. You start to get nervous when the value of a comic book or graphic novel is relative to the achievements of some other medium.
Adrian Tomine
#42. I'm an unabashed fan of 'The New Yorker.' I do feel proud when I see my artwork in there.
Adrian Tomine
#43. I sense a real difference in my work from the time I was younger and single and more involved in the world of music and going out to bars and all that. There were points at which I was trying to use my art to reflect positively on myself, to almost be flirtatious through the work.
Adrian Tomine
#44. I'm always pointing things out to native New Yorkers that I think are weird about this place and their culture and all that. But I feel like my friends and family from California feel like I've totally "become a New Yorker."
Adrian Tomine
#45. I intentionally approached each story in 'Killing and Dying' in a different way, and that includes the writing process.
Adrian Tomine
#46. One of the by-products of being allowed to start my professional career prematurely is that the evolution of my work is really evident.
Adrian Tomine
#47. I guess there's just a part of me that's not very enthusiastic about finding myself ten years from now halfway through a story that may or may not be any good.
Adrian Tomine
#48. When I started creating my work for publication, I just assumed that the focus would be on the work itself and that there wouldn't be a lot of interest in who was creating the work.
Adrian Tomine
#49. There's a lot of books that I've purchased simply because of the cover design. On the other hand, there's certain books that, even if I'm very curious about the content, I can't bring myself to buy if I really dislike the cover.
Adrian Tomine
#50. Most normal boys, as they're growing up, they - in order to become attractive, they might, you know, get good at sports or join a rock band or develop good social skills, and for some reason, I thought that drawing comic books might be my route.
Adrian Tomine
#51. I was very aware of the fact that there are a lot of comics out there that I love, because I've grown up my whole life reading comics and I know every little nuance of the language and all the implications.
Adrian Tomine
#52. Even though I'm usually not conscious of it, I think drawing has always served a sort of therapeutic purpose in my life. There's something about the process of translating the messy chaos of real life into a clean, simple drawing that's always been comforting to me.
Adrian Tomine
#53. 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.
Adrian Tomine
#54. When I first started drawing the earliest incarnation of 'Optic Nerve,' I hadn't even been on a date; I hadn't had a romantic relationship of any kind yet, so in a way, I was almost writing science fiction.
Adrian Tomine
#55. To be perfectly honest, if it was up to me, I would be invisible as an artist.
Adrian Tomine
#57. There were certainly some people who wanted me to do a feel-good story that affirmed a lot of very commonly held beliefs.
Adrian Tomine
#58. There are some people who may not like precision in their art. They may like it to be grittier and more gestural, more of a direct expression in the way that a painter would put his strokes on canvas.
Adrian Tomine
#59. When people see me struggling on paper, I think it invites an almost collaborative relationship with the outside world, and that includes readers and other artists.
Adrian Tomine
#60. The basic work schedule for me is whenever I'm not doing anything more important, like taking care of my kids or something. So, it's most of the day, five days a week, most evenings and sometimes on the weekends.
Adrian Tomine
#61. I enjoy getting any kind of mail. Like, for me, like, the more interesting a letter is, I just get more excited, and I know that this going to be great for my friends who are looking forward to reading that in my comic.
Adrian Tomine
#62. To me, one of the big fears of doing a big huge graphic novel is locking yourself into one style and getting halfway through it and going, 'Oh I made the wrong choice,' which is a recurring nightmare I have.
Adrian Tomine
#63. Fortunately, I've never had to be too critical of my own work, because the world is critical enough.
Adrian Tomine
#64. I've always been really impressed with some of the longer graphic novels and thought it would be really amazing if one day I could try something like that.
Adrian Tomine
#65. I've always liked the tradition of publishing work serially in the comic-book 'pamphlet' format and then collecting that work in book form, so I've just stuck with it.
Adrian Tomine
#66. I do think that many Americans have a limited view of what constitutes Japanese cartooning based on what gets translated, so it's great to see an increase in diversity.
Adrian Tomine
#67. 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.
Adrian Tomine
#68. I think the response I get to one 'New Yorker' cover outweighs five books that I publish.
Adrian Tomine
#69. That partially due to the world of media and commerce, the idea of a comic book has been lost in the ghetto, whereas the graphic novel is now being held up as something to aspire to and as something that's respectable for adults to read.
Adrian Tomine
#70. I'm getting to a point in my life where my whole attitude about the relationship between myself and the audience is totally different.
Adrian Tomine
#71. When email and the Internet came along, I never publish an email address. I just stuck with this P.O. Box address.
Adrian Tomine
#72. I was thinking about what it was like for my parents to have a strange kid with a hobby or a pursuit that maybe they weren't that familiar with. It must have been a strange experience - nerve-wracking, in some ways.
Adrian Tomine
#73. There are certain artists and filmmakers who, I get the impression, are trying to show off how bad their characters can be, how immoral their characters can be.
Adrian Tomine
#74. The story entitled 'Good-Bye' is probably Tatsumi's most well-known work, and I think it's a good representation of many of Tatsumi's skills and stylistic tendencies.
Adrian Tomine
#75. 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.
Adrian Tomine
#76. 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.
Adrian Tomine
#77. If anything, I feel a bit of pressure to write about less disenfranchised people, because I'd probably sell more books that way and would've already had some hot property that I could've sold to Hollywood.
Adrian Tomine
#78. I think that artists, at a certain point, can either become defiant and say that the audience is wrong, readers don't get them, and they're going to keep doing it their own way, or they can listen to the criticism - and not necessarily blindly follow the audience's requests and advice.
Adrian Tomine
#79. And also, as a consumer now, it's weird that when I used to go to a book signing I would leave with a stack of pamphlets people had made to show off their work, and now I just leave with business cards where people have the URL to their websites.
Adrian Tomine
#80. It's important to make a distinction between becoming more precise and becoming better.
Adrian Tomine
#81. I was just taking my sketchbook to Kinko's and making photocopies and hand-assembling them - folding them over and stapling them.
Adrian Tomine
#82. I certainly wasn't consciously hiding my identity in the earlier work, though a lot of people have brought up the fact that I drew myself without eyeballs.
Adrian Tomine
#83. I had relatives who would go to Japan and bring back random stuff they bought at the airport or whatever - 'Ultraman' and 'Speed Racer,' stuff like that.
Adrian Tomine
#84. I'm always a little apprehensive about 'decoding' fictional stories.
Adrian Tomine
#85. I think it's harder for each generation. Even I just feel completely separate from teenagers today who have access to the Internet. And I'm amazed that this interest in video games has never gone away. It just keeps growing.
Adrian Tomine
#86. 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.
Adrian Tomine
#87. I love the idea of trying to do the work of old-fashioned novelists of plotting and of really making you curious about what's going to happen next and all that, but also trying to load it up with your weird thoughts and opinions.
Adrian Tomine
#88. I'm Japanese, but restaurants in my hometown served the most sanitized versions of California rolls. I grew up eating a lot of Japanese food at home that my parents or grandparents made.
Adrian Tomine
#89. I think comics can be the basis for great films, but I think the focus of such a project should be on making the film as good as possible, not on painstakingly replicating the comic.
Adrian Tomine
#90. Especially for people of our generation, who really celebrated certain attitudes - the outsider, the loner - it can have a real impact on the art when they realize, I have friends, I'm married, or I have kids. That's certainly happened to me.
Adrian Tomine
#91. Most of my work - including everything from my own comics to the covers I've drawn for 'The New Yorker' - is the result of taking some personal experience or observation and then fictionalizing it to a degree.
Adrian Tomine
#92. My responsibility is to present things in a way that is realistic and true to the multifaceted world I've known ... This is how I think the world is, not how it should be.
Adrian Tomine
#93. 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.
Adrian Tomine
#94. Readers often bring a different set of criteria to the work based on the format.
Adrian Tomine
#95. 'Drawn & Quarterly' has always given me complete editorial control over my books and comics, so any decision about what to include or exclude from the book was my own.
Adrian Tomine
#96. It's absolutely chilling to think that I've been working on a comic-book series called 'Optic Nerve' since I was sixteen.
Adrian Tomine
#97. I started publishing my comic while I was still living with my parents.
Adrian Tomine
#98. The art editor in charge of the covers at the 'New Yorker' is Francoise Mouly. She's very familiar with the eccentricities and personalities of cartoonists, so working with her is very easy.
Adrian Tomine
#99. I've always published a range of responses to my work in the letters section of my comic book.
Adrian Tomine
#100. I get the impression from some people that unless they get direct access to characters' thoughts and realizations, either through thought balloons or narrations or some sort of showy action, then those thoughts and realizations never existed.
Adrian Tomine
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