Chester Brown Quotes

#1. I don't worry about how accurately I convey my personality. I learned early on that it's almost impossible to accurately portray yourself.

Chester Brown

#2. With each of those projects I wasn't thinking about how the layout would really affect the story I was working on - it wasn't the content that was affecting the layout, it was, how I wanted to draw at that point in time.

Chester Brown

#3. I think most people are motivated to want to do what is best for themselves. People want to avoid STDs. I believe in a system that leaves it up to the individual to protect their own health.

Chester Brown

#4. I think people should have the legal right to hurt themselves without fearing that they're going to get locked up for doing so. But on a personal level, if someone I loved was hurting himself or herself in front of me, I would, of course, try to restrain them.

Chester Brown

#5. I think politics is important. It's how we run our society. I think it should be natural to have an interest in the subject, and I almost don't understand why some people don't.

Chester Brown

#6. I consider myself a right-winger and Gray was certainly one.

Chester Brown

#7. I'm against government giving money to artists, but I'm not against artists taking money. Just like I don't have a moral problem with people taking healthcare from the government, but I don't think government should give it.

Chester Brown

#8. Alan Moore does have a sheen of class. He's a smart guy, and I'm sure there was a metaphoric level, I'm not denying that, but let's face it. the main reason he was doing a super-hero comic was because he was working for a super-hero comic book company.

Chester Brown

#9. I am for decriminalization. The significant aspect of that is that we don't force prostitutes to have to get a license to work. I think the whole idea of licensing consensual sex between adults is offensive.

Chester Brown

#10. Our culture pushes this idea that romantic love is somehow more significant than other forms of love.

Chester Brown

#11. I Never Liked You. I think that's my best book. I think it works the best as a story, and I like the drawing. It works on both levels, for me at least.

Chester Brown

#12. 'Penthouse' didn't seem to concentrate as much on the girls' faces, and I really wanted to see the girls' faces. It seems like through the 1980's, they almost went out of their way to obscure the girls' faces.

Chester Brown

#13. As far as sex slavery goes, in Canada, if the woman has a Canadian accent, I'm confident that she hasn't been trafficked and forced to work as a prostitute.

Chester Brown

#14. I was looking to do something non-fiction because I had done a strip, 'My Mom Was a Schizophrenic.' I really enjoyed the process of doing that strip, despite its subject matter. To do it I'd had to do a lot of research and reading and I figured I'd like to do that again.

Chester Brown

#15. As far as women who are being abused by pimps, I think if you see women who do incalls or outcalls rather than work on the street, they are less likely - from what I've heard - to have pimps. But you can't be sure.

Chester Brown

#16. If I can avoid doing freelance work, I prefer to. Not just because it takes me away from drawing comics, but also because it's just annoying having to deal with art editors, and having to read people's articles or books or whatever.

Chester Brown

#17. The director is planning on titling the film 'Yummy Fur' so we are probably planning on changing the title of the book to 'Yummy Fur' to match the film.

Chester Brown

#18. I'd begun reading Crumb shortly before that, and other underground stuff, so that was an influence to some degree. Of course the Marvel and DC comics, they had been my main interests in my teenage years.

Chester Brown

#19. There I was limited to what happened the same way I am with Riel. It doesn't feel like a great burden to have your story, to some degree, set. I am enjoying figuring out what I think is the most dramatic way of telling this set of historical facts.

Chester Brown

#20. You kind of hope that the events themselves are interesting. I think that's what you have to hope for, that on a broad level it's an interesting story.

Chester Brown

#21. The counter-argument would be, so what if my sexual relationships are superficial, one can still have satisfying and rewarding relationships with friends, or parents, or siblings, or whatever.

Chester Brown

#22. We couldn't be making as much money, if we had to deal with stranger behaviour. And right now, anybody who slows down our economic productivity, off they go. We have a place for them, the psychiatric institution. That's the main thing, they slow things down.

Chester Brown

#23. When I was a teenager, 'Playboy' was the most interesting magazine in the world, and not just for the playmates. I liked the interviews and the stories, and all that, but nowadays most of the stuff in there doesn't interest me.

Chester Brown

#24. The whole schizophrenia angle interested me. When I first started working on it, I thought I would play up that angle more than I ended up doing. The religious aspect of the story was also a draw.

Chester Brown

#25. If I do need to make money suddenly, I prefer to just draw something I want to draw and have someone else sell it for me on the Internet.

Chester Brown

#26. I have stuff I'm interested in working on, and I'd rather work on what excites me than complete projects from the past that I've grown bored with.

Chester Brown

#27. Just because a woman has a pimp doesn't necessarily mean that she's being abused by the guy. You can't know for sure.

Chester Brown

#28. I think the thinking is, in the comic books, I should pack as much onto a page as possible, because, you know, it's kind of the cheaper format, and you want to give readers as much as you can for their dollar.

Chester Brown

#29. The main problem was a pacing problem. I had wanted the project to be about 20-30 issues, and I should have written it out as a full script beforehand.

Chester Brown

#30. I'm planning on finishing the Gospels at some point.

Chester Brown

#31. There's a bit of debate about that; some say it was really Matthew, but the popular consensus is that Mark was the first one, so that's why I did that one first. And I was planning on doing all four.

Chester Brown

#32. The scientists at the end of the 19th century had people coming to them with this weird behaviour, and they didn't know what was going on but there seemed to be a similarity. They needed an answer, so they made up one.

Chester Brown

#33. They thought they were identifying a set of behaviours, but yeah, they just wanted to have an answer.

Chester Brown

#34. It's not so much that I got that idea at some point, it came up naturally because of the improvisational nature of the story I was telling.

Chester Brown

#35. Almost every scene, I re-think as I'm about to start drawing it, and at least half of the time I'm changing dialogue or whatever, or adding scenes or different things.

Chester Brown

#36. There were a couple of instances where what I'm thinking during sex was relevant, so I might as well show myself having sex. I could have gone from a shot of the bed to just showing the ceiling and my thought bubble. Or maybe just show the feet.

Chester Brown

#37. We're not very accepting of people who act strangely.

Chester Brown

#38. That's the thing. in medicine, you're used to saying there's a problem within the person, and saying there's a problem within the culture, that's not a medical answer. Medicine has to look in one direction, so there's only one type of answer that they can find.

Chester Brown

#39. It's because I do see sex as sacred and potentially spiritual that I believe in commercializing it and making this potentially holy experience more easily available to all.

Chester Brown