Top 100 A Cartoonist Quotes
#1. I'm a cartoonist, it's what I am at heart, so cartoons take reality and deform it and make it grotesque, you make it funny, but you alter it. If it works, it's based on reality. That's what I try to do.
Terry Gilliam
#2. Cartooning at its best is a fine art. I'm a cartoonist who works in the medium of animation, which also allows me to paint my cartoons.
Ralph Bakshi
#3. And remember whatever discipline you're in, whether you're a musician or a photographer, fine artist or a cartoonist, writer, a dancer, a singer, a designer... whatever you do, you have a thing that's unique. You have the ability to make art.
Neil Gaiman
#4. I knew I wanted to be some kind of artist from about 12. I met a neighbour who drew cartoons, and I had an idea I wanted to be a cartoonist - or something that involved Indian ink, at any rate.
Edward Ruscha
#5. I don't think of myself as an illustrator. I think of myself as a cartoonist. I write the story with pictures - I don't illustrate the story with the pictures.
Chris Ware
#6. I started on the fringes of journalism as a cartoonist on The Daily Mail.
Humphrey Lyttelton
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. As a cartoonist, I'm a caricaturist. First you find out what somebody really looks like, and then you find out what they 'really' look like.
Frank Miller
#10. The comedians I liked were Bill Cosby and Steven Wright, like just always as a comedic actor. I always liked Gary Larson, who's really funny for a cartoonist, obviously.
Demetri Martin
#11. If you want to find out what a writer or a cartoonist really feels, look at his work. That's enough.
Shel Silverstein
#12. People often ask me about my upbringing, and if there was anything particular about it that made me become a cartoonist.
Robert Mankoff
#13. In college, I was a cartoonist at 'The Daily Northwestern.' So I draw myself. I was an animator. But basically, I went to Northwestern to major in English, wound up in college for two years. Studied animation there. Came to Disney. My first week at Disney was the week that 'Star Wars' came out.
John Musker
#14. I really wanted to be a cartoonist, and I was in 4th or 5th grade and I would bring my drawings in, and I'd look around, and everyone could draw better than me. Everyone. My drawings were just awful. So that's why I had to write.
R.L. Stine
#15. Comic-book pages are vertical, and movie screens are relentlessly horizontal. But it's all the same form. We use different tools, but we get the job done. I'm completely in love with CGI. It's great for conveying a cartoonist's sense of reality.
Frank Miller
#16. When I was a kid, I could draw, and my ambition was to be a cartoonist. I wanted to draw comics. But I also liked newspaper comics.
Pete Hamill
#17. 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
#18. It seems so absurd to get really mad with a cartoonist over a comic strip. It's sort of like getting in a fight with a circus clown outside your house. It's not going to end well.
Stephan Pastis
#19. In 1908, you could easily earn $20 to $200 as a cartoonist. What's amazing is that it's still true!
Art Spiegelman
#20. If I were wearing jeans, I'd be wearing the uniform of a cartoonist.
Don Wright
#21. A cartoonist creates his whole universe without any input.
Mark Hamill
#22. As a cartoonist I do what I find funny. As an editor I have a broader approach realizing that humor is inherently subjective and I don't want my preferences to rule out what others might like.
Robert Mankoff
#23. I was a cartoonist when I was at university, but I decided to go into movie making knowing that I could still draw by doing movies, design work, story boards, and such.
Robert Rodriguez
#24. Most success springs from an obstacle or failure. I became a cartoonist largely because I failed in my goal of becoming a successful executive.
Scott Adams
#25. I've never met a cartoonist who isn't quirky or weird in some ways.
Jules Feiffer
#26. It was actually an Israeli cartoonist, Nurit Karlin, who made me think that I could draw for 'The New Yorker.' I saw her work published in the magazine in the early 1970s - she was the only woman working as a cartoonist at 'The New Yorker' at the time.
Liza Donnelly
#27. As a fan, I'm distraught, but as a cartoonist looking at new vacant spaces in 2400 newspapers, well, behind me, my cats are dancing a conga line.
Scott Adams
#28. If you're a kid wanting to be a cartoonist today, and you're looking at Family Guy, you don't have to aim very high.
John Kricfalusi
#29. In my journey as a cartoonist, I seem to have accidentally stumbled into all sorts of traps, damnations and blacklists.
Michael Leunig
#30. I separate cartooning, which is fun and wacky and soulful, from illustration, which is very well-drawn and extremely uptight to look at. There's a difference. I'm a cartoonist.
Ralph Bakshi
#31. My dad used to draw these great cartoon figures. His dream was being a cartoonist, but he never achieved it, and it kind of broke my heart. I think part of my interest in art had to do with his yearning for something he could never have.
Kathryn Bigelow
#32. A cartoonist is someone who has to draw the same thing day after day without repeating himself.
Charles M. Schulz
#33. I never saw myself so much as an actor. I wanted to be a cartoonist like Charles M. Schulz and create my own world and be able to have a studio at home and not commute and be able to be with my family.
Mark Hamill
#34. Naturally, my Jewish mother, like all Jewish mothers, wanted me to be a doctor, or a lawyer... or as she used to say, "Be something!" I wanted to be a cartoonist. Oy vey, a cartoonist was not on her list... I
Gideon Amichay
#35. I started doing cartoons when I was about 21. I never thought I would be a cartoonist. It happened behind my back. I was always a painter and drawer.
Lynda Barry
#36. Remember: I am a cartoonist. If you follow my advice on safety around nuclear materials, you probably deserve whatever happens to you.
Randall Munroe
#37. If you're a painter, it's simply taken for granted that you'll spend a lot of time in museums studying great paintings, but if you're a cartoonist, it used to be very hard to see an original cartoon drawing.
Bill Watterson
#38. I wanted to be a cartoonist. I was one of those kids who sat around and drew in my room all the time.
Michael Stuhlbarg
#39. I never graduated, but I was kind of floating between journalism and art, because neither one wanted to claim me, as a cartoonist.
Jeff Smith
#40. In pre-school, I was drawing dinosaurs - I was huge into dinosaurs. I wanted to be a paleontologist, not a cartoonist or a filmmaker or anything like that - just a paleontologist. So I would draw dinosaurs.
Jhonen Vasquez
#41. Russian cars are silly. They look like imports drawn by a cartoonist for a UAW newsletter.
P. J. O'Rourke
#42. I hate this word 'graphic novel.' It is a term publishing houses have created for the bourgeois so they wouldn't be ashamed of buying comics ... I'm not a graphic novelist. I am a cartoonist and I make comics and I am very happy about it.
Marjane Satrapi
#43. People still think of me as a cartoonist, but the only thing I lift a pen or pencil for these days is to sign a contract, a check, or an autograph.
Walt Disney
#44. Line is so versatile - you can do a fine, tight, closely observed description or simply put a line around an idea - like a cartoonist.
Stan Smith
#45. I became a cartoonist because I'd sort of failed at everything else, really. I mean, it was by default.
Michael Leunig
#46. I've always defined myself not as a cartoonist, but as an entrepreneur. That was true before I tried cartooning. I always imagined cartooning would be how I got my seed capital. I always thought my other businesses would be the less dominant part of my life.
Scott Adams
#47. I went through a phase where people would introduce me at parties as a cartoonist, and everybody felt sorry for me. 'Oh, Matt's a cartoonist.' Then people further feeling sorry for me would ask me to draw Garfield. Because I'm a cartoonist, draw Snoopy or Garfield or something.
Matt Groening
#49. I tend to write my beginnings and endings first - as a cartoonist and storyteller, I couldn't sit down every day if I didn't know where the story was headed.
Jeff Lemire
#50. I'd have been a filmmaker or a cartoonist or something else which extended from the visual arts into the making of narratives if I hadn't been able to shift into fiction.
Jonathan Lethem
#51. When I first seriously decided to become a cartoonist would have been '99/2000, right before 9/11. I've been writing and illustrating stories in the world post-9/11 since then, watching the world change around me.
Jeff Lemire
#52. 'The Green Turtle' was created in the 1940s by a cartoonist named Chu Hing, one of the first Asian Americans to work in the American comic book industry.
Gene Luen Yang
#53. James Thurber was an inspiration because his drawings were so primitive. I am self-taught - I didn't go to art school - so I thought when I started doing them, 'If James Thurber can be a cartoonist, I can,' because his stuff is very raw.
Bruce Eric Kaplan
#54. I was unable to sleep and I would stay up and draw these little cartoons. Then a friend showed them around. Before I knew it I was a cartoonist.
Lynda Barry
#55. You can write a script, but that's just a starting point as a cartoonist. The heart of the process comes when you start to draw it, and you work out how to lay the page out, how best to tell the story.
Jeff Lemire
#56. I'm a cartoonist. I write and draw comic books and graphic novels. I'm also a coder.
Gene Luen Yang
#57. My transition from wanting to be a cartoonist to wanting to be a writer may have come about through that friendly opposition, that even-handed pairing, of pictures and words.
John Updike
#58. I still go through stages of wanting to try other trades. When I was young I thought I'd be a magician. And then a cartoonist. Or a professional roller-skater. But there wasn't much support for those on career day.
Jason Mraz
#59. If you want to be a cartoonist, live the life of a cartoonist.
Oliver Gaspirtz
#60. The best thing about being a cartoonist is to walk into a bar or someone's apartment and they don't know you, but they've taped one of your pieces up.
Ted Rall
#61. As a kid, I knew I wanted to be either a cartoonist or an astronaut. The latter was never much of a possibility, as I don't even like riding in elevators.
Bill Watterson
#62. Obviously there's not much options when you're a cartoonist - you pretty much either work at home or rent an office I guess, and working at home just seems easier.
Scott Adams
#63. There are two ways to look at my publishing career. One is that I'm a novelist churning out books, who is eight into a series; the other way is that I'm a cartoonist, just starting out. Most cartoonists have long careers: Charles Schulz drew Peanuts for 50 years.
Jeff Kinney
#64. When I first started as an editorial cartoonist, I was terrified on a daily basis. Filling that hole the next day, knowing that tens of thousands of people were going to expect something funny. There is still that pressure, but you kind of learn how to cope with it a little better.
Steve Breen
#65. If a good cartoonist can make a living making his comics, he'll continue to do that; the lesser insincere cartoonist that gets a lot of press will fall by the wayside eventually.
Gilberto Hernandez Guerrero
#66. I don't think I would've ever dared dreaming of becoming a professional cartoonist. I wouldn't set myself up for that disappointment.
David Rees
#67. I was doing political cartoons and getting angry to the point where I felt I was going to have to start making and throwing bombs. I thought I was probably a better cartoonist than a bomb maker.
Terry Gilliam
#68. You can draw Family Guy when you're 10 years old. You don't have to get any better than that to become a professional cartoonist. The standards are extremely low.
John Kricfalusi
#69. 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
#70. Being a naive 20-something I didn't think that I could just go to the screen cartoonist's union, that I was a member of, and scream bloody murder and they would have jumped all over this guy and said, "Oh, but yes he does get screen credit."
Mike Royer
#71. I really wanted to be a newspaper cartoonist, but nobody liked my work. I didn't have the control or flair that was necessary to create something that didn't look childish.
Jeff Kinney
#72. I write plays and movies, I live and work at the borderline between word and image just as any cartoonist or illustrator does. I'm not a pure writer. I use words as the score for kinetic imagistic representations.
Tony Kushner
#73. I've certainly seen a lot of my cartoonist friends embrace 'Little Lulu' in a much deeper way because their kids love it so much. But that's not gonna be happening for me. There are no kids coming.
Seth
#74. The truth was, the difference between a studio photographer and a photojournalist was the same as the difference between a political cartoonist and an abstract painter; the only thing the two had in common was the blank page.
Lynsey Addario
#75. Nobody could be a professional cartoonist, because you have to do something you don't like to do in order to be a responsible adult and pay the rent.
David Rees
#76. I started out wanting to be a straight adventure cartoonist, but in 1979 realized what my real bag was.
Mike Royer
#77. One of the perks of being a 'New Yorker' cartoonist is that you get to hang around with interesting people. My fellow cartoonists are all interesting, and all highly creative.
Liza Donnelly
#78. I'm just a little old cartoonist, tryin' to make a buck.
Walter Lantz
#79. My first ambition was to be an animator for Walt Disney. Then I wanted to be a magazine cartoonist.
John Updike
#80. I hope some historian will confirm that I was the first cartoonist to use the word 'booger' in a newspaper comic strip.
Bill Watterson
#83. There is a relationship between cartooning and people like Mir= and Picasso which may not be understood by the cartoonist, but it definitely is related even in the early Disney.
Roy Lichtenstein
#84. I guess I just don't have the killer instinct that I think makes a great political cartoonist.
Bill Watterson
#85. I'm a better editorial cartoonist by default because so many editorial cartoonists out there are so awful.
Ted Rall
#86. You can't just count on becoming a syndicated cartoonist. I actually tried to calculate the odds once, and the best I could come up with is a 1-in-36,000 chance. And the odds of getting hit by lightning are 1 in 7,900 - which kind of shows how long those odds are.
Stephan Pastis
#87. When people ask me what is an editorial cartoonist, I often say we're kind of a hybrid. We're a cross between Edward R. Morrow, Ted Koppel and the Son of Sam.
Michael Ramirez
#88. I felt so painfully isolated that I vowed I would get revenge on the world by becoming a famous cartoonist.
Robert Crumb
#89. My father was a really sharp cartoonist and filmmaker. He used to tape-record the family surreptitiously, either while we were driving around or at dinner, and in 1963 he and I made up a story about a brother and a sister, Lisa and Matt, having an adventure out in the woods with animals.
Matt Groening
#90. Almost every cartoonist, when he's sitting down to draw a funny face, if you watch him closely, his mouth is gonna curl to the expression that he's drawing. But when I would write a story - I know it's going to sound almost ridiculous and infantile - I would, in a way, start living it.
Al Jaffee
#91. Humor is basically a cognitive process. And it's a creative process not only on the part of the cartoonist but on the part of the viewer.
Robert Mankoff
#92. When the cartoonist is trying to talk honestly and seriously about life, then I believe he has a responsibility to think beyond satisfying the market's every whim and desire.
Bill Watterson
#93. I answered an ad, for a campus cartoonist at the university I was in, my freshman year. I was like, Oh, I can draw, and I'm sort of a funny guy. I should try this. Then they paid me to do a comic strip for the paper.
Dan Povenmire
#94. Ah, the life of a newspaper cartoonist
how I miss the groupies, drugs and trashed hotel rooms!
Bill Watterson
#95. The truth is, the difference between a studio photographer and a photojournalist is the same as the difference between a political cartoonist and an abstract painter; the only thing the two have in common is the blank page. The jobs entail different talents and different desires.
Lynsey Addario
#96. I would think a sense of the absurd is more important for a political cartoonist, because that could define things like a sense of hypocrisy or a sense of the things one has to be skeptical about.
Jonathan Shapiro
#97. In many ways, my entire graphic novel career was a long diversion. Originally, all I wanted to do was to be an underground cartoonist and maybe bring out a groovy underground mag.
Alan Moore
#98. When I had independence, it was a constant battle within me to figure out when am I on my own. And also the insecurity that my life engendered, especially as a freelance cartoonist, kept me in a constant state of anxiety as to whether I am going to be able to meet my financial obligations.
Al Jaffee
#99. I stay out of politics because if I begin thinking too much about politics, I'll probably ... drop writing children's books and become a political cartoonist again.
Dr. Seuss
#100. One identity is as a television writer, which is very classically Southern California, but another of my personae is as a New Yorker cartoonist.
Bruce Eric Kaplan
