Jim Woodring Quotes

#1. Doing a story about my mundane, waking life, how much I don't like my job, or breaking up with someone, I don't think so. Those stories don't interest me that much as a general thing.

Jim Woodring

#2. She was another world to me; she and the regular world stood side by side and made two worlds. I loved them both.

Jim Woodring

#3. I wanted to be a pariah, because all my heroes were cult artists, people who devoted their lives to poking into very narrow, very deep corners - Erik Satie, Alfred Jarry, Malcolm Lowry - people who suffered in order to express their vision of life.

Jim Woodring

#4. I have a personal definition of cartooning, which is, simply, "imaginative drawing." Anything you're drawing that is not in front of you but is a mental construct that you want to express in a drawing is, to me, a cartoon.

Jim Woodring

#5. I've often thought I would like to try to write a conventional novel, but I just don't know enough about the real world to write one.

Jim Woodring

#6. Consensus reality seemed like a dull, dead-end street compared to the intense, mutable reality of visions or whatever they were - neurological misfires. I expected life to be full of sudden, inexplicable surprises. When these things didn't happen for a while, life seemed dull and painful.

Jim Woodring

#7. Everything I do tries to do the same thing, which is to express things that are hard to express, hidden things.

Jim Woodring

#8. I've heard that Alfred Hitchcock said that by the time he was ready to shoot a film, he didn't even want to do it any more because he'd already had all of the fun of working it out. It's the same thing with these Frank comics.

Jim Woodring

#9. It's funny, in some of the interviews I've seen that were done for the film, some people say things like, 'Oh, I was never a very big Jim Woodring fan. I've never thought his work was that great.'

Jim Woodring

#10. Every time I write something down I check it to see if it has that telltale glow, the glow that tells me there's something there. If it glows, it stays. Everything is either on or off.

Jim Woodring

#11. Like a lot of freelance cartoonists, when any opportunity like that comes along, I have a hard time saying no, whether it makes sense or not.

Jim Woodring

#12. People aren't interested in seeing themselves as they really are.

Jim Woodring

#13. Real shapes and real patterns are things you would observe in nature, like the marks on the back of a cobra's hood or the markings on a fish or a lizard. Imaginary shapes are just that, symbols that come to a person in dreams or reveries and are charged with meaning.

Jim Woodring

#14. Leslie Stein's comics give readers privileged access to a complete and wholly original world of gently skewed wonders.

Jim Woodring

#15. I guess if I had to put it into a single phrase, the moral of the Frank stories is that the hammer never really falls.

Jim Woodring

#16. A tree is an incomprehensible mystery.

Jim Woodring

#17. Comics could use more creators with something worthwhile to say.

Jim Woodring

#18. The fiction I tend to like is nothing like my own work. I like the kind of writing that shows me things I don't know about, and what I don't know about is the everyday, normal world.

Jim Woodring

#19. I don't trust my mind for everyday thinking, but I am convinced that it has one very great function, which is to eventually make me aware of astounding things.

Jim Woodring

#20. I think that cartoons have a lot more power than they're given credit for.

Jim Woodring

#21. If I had learned how to get along in the quotidian world while keeping up the search for the hidden realm, I might have gotten more out of life. But I believed I was doing hugely important work. I was elitist about it.

Jim Woodring

#22. Alternative cartoonists have to rely on comic book stores to get their stuff in the hands of readers.

Jim Woodring

#23. It takes more drawing to tell a story in pantomime.

Jim Woodring

#24. When I was a kid, I used to see apparitions and have hallucinations, and my entire perception of the world was badly disoriented. And I had kind of a chaotic childhood because of that. I've really hung onto it, though. Because I actually like those feelings.

Jim Woodring

#25. That Moorish architecture is all over the place, of course. It affects me everywhere I see it, as it does so many people. But Brand Library was a special place to me, and I know I've paid homage to it many times in my drawings.

Jim Woodring

#26. When I started formulating the first Frank comic, I knew I wanted it to be something that was beyond time and specific place. I felt that having the characters speak would tie it to 20th-century America, because that would be the idiom of the language they would use, the language I use.

Jim Woodring