Comic Quotations

And I had worked at the comic-book store almost by accident, because I was deciding to make a living as an artist, be it as an art tutor or illustrator, and that's how I wanted to make my living.

I love cartoons, I love comic books and graphic novels. 'Batman: The Animated Series' was a huge influence on me when I was younger.

Estelle Getty used the language of a truck driver, or a sailor. Bea Arthur didn't wear shoes. Bea Arthur was a comic genius. Her timing was extraordinary.

I didn't read comic books; that's not something that was really available to me as a child. We watched more cartoons and movies.

I dug up some old John Buscema 'Conan' comics. Man, when Alfredo Alcala was inking, that was some of the most beautiful black and white comic art ever published. The stories are good, too, though early '70s comics based on Conan is a festival of sexist, racist stereotypes.

It seems like they make every comic book into a film. 'Watchmen' is my favorite of all time.

I had seen other comic friends of mine go to indie labels. Like David Cross and Pat Oswald went to Subpop, and Subpop didn't make total sense for me, but the metal version of that did. So I made a small list with Metal Blade, Prosthetic and couple of other labels, and Relapse was one of them.

I'd heard Joyce Grenfell on the radio, and when Mum gave me a book of her comic routines, I just loved it. Me and my sister shared a bedroom, and every night I'd drive her mad with my version of 'George, Don't Do That' about people we knew at school.

One of the things when you're drawing a comic book is that you're spending four or five times as long to draw it as the writer takes to write it. In my career I've had to spend a week drawing something that a writer has thrown out in an hour. And there's nothing worse than having to work on something that no previous thought has gone into.

Cheating on a quiz show? That's sort of like plagiarizing a comic strip.

Comic fans are some of the toughest fans to please, and I'm one of them.

You know, I'm a big comic book fan. As a kid I used to collect them until there was a horrible mudslide in Hollywood and I lost my collection, but I was also at an early age the voice of 'Jonny Quest;' it was a cartoon; so I am kind of a latent fan boy.

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.

I grew up reading not-serious literature, like comic books and pulp novels, so my instinct is to amuse the reader and entertain.

One of the interesting things about Twitter is looking how famous people choose to use it. Take someone like Steve Martin, who I follow: it's all sorts of comic gems, nothing private, nothing personal - all jokes. Other celebrities are overtly personal - like Charlie Sheen. I do a mix of observations and updates.

Being from Russia, I respect all of the comic books American people love. We do follow it a lot.

I did a 'Last Comic Standing' audition in 2006, where you're just performing for three people in a comedy club, in a big comedy club, and I remember them cutting me off, asking about my name in the middle of one of my jokes. Yeah, it's just real weird when you're doing stand-up in that type of sterile, unnatural setting.

People called me a hoodlum and a thug. But they didn't tell you I was a carpenter, an architect, a stand-up comic - even a bartender. And a barbecue cook. But they didn't tell you that.

With the stand-up comic on TV, whether it's Seinfeld or Cosby or Roseanne, more important than their knowledge of how to tell a joke is their knowledge of themselves, or the persona they've created as themselves. So that when you're in a room with writers, you can say, 'Guys, that's a funny line, but I wouldn't say it.'

My first big gig was as a correspondent on Comedy Central's 'The Daily Show.' My job was to parody TV reporters and political pundits. As a result, I was often invited onto cable news shows as comic relief.

I didn't really grow up a comic book fanatic.

We are, in the comics, the last frontier of good, wholesome family humor and entertainment.

One of the things I would love to do is 'Axe Cop,' which is a comic book. I would like to be involved in 'Axe Cop' someday. I would also love to be in a Western.

What interested me in doing 'Dragonball' was that it's a huge comic book series that has built a great fan base, and it's a great action movie!

I don't really find things funny unless they're deeply tragic at the same time. I think if you're funny just for the sake of being funny, it's just frivolous nonsense. To me, all the best comic plays have been written about really serious and rather bleak things.

Most comic scriptwriters are very bad. The artists are good, but the writers are so bad.

Oh my God, I'm so excited. I love Comic-Con, it feels like a weird nerd camp. All my nerd friends are there and all the comic book writers I know and then a lot of actors, too, and you hang out with these people for just a few days, but you hang out with them all day, every day. It's like camp - it's like a weird camp. I love it.

I'm a big comic book person. I love Captain America. I like John Henry. I'm hoping to play one of the superhero characters that's coming from Marvel.

Writing this book feels like a completely different activity from writing my comic strip because it's about real life. I feel like I'm using a part of my brain that's been dormant until now.

I did not want to put myself on the line, as an Australian playing Britain's greatest comic actor. The fans of Sellers are obsessive, possessive - and aggressive. I did not want to risk their anger - or my own reputation.

It's interesting to me; you do four, five or six of these Comic Cons or things like that across the country a year. Obviously, I get busted a lot of 'Weekend at Bernies,' but the fans for horror movies are so wonderful and so loyal.

I grew up not reading fiction; I watched movies and read comic books, and one of the ways I taught myself to think about narrative was through film.

When I was a kid, there were these great comic books called 'Tales From The Crypt' and 'The Vault of Horror.' They were gruesome. I discovered them in the barbershop and thought they were fabulous.

There are too many good comic book writers out there. I'd rather remain a fanboy.

As a brunette, I had previously been this serious actress. Then I became a blonde and got to play a completely different, comic role.

One of the first comic things you do is imitate.

For English assignments I was constantly coming up with these strange adventure stories... But I actually wanted to be an artist, or maybe work in the comic book industry.

When I was a young comic just starting out, I was very cautious, as I didn't want to alienate people. George Carlin's bravery became a benchmark. I became perfectly fine with alienating some people in the audience. That just comes with the territory.

I'd love to do comedy. And I think I have pretty good sense of comic timing, so I'd really like to try that.

I vividly remember my first 'Superman' comic, which my granddad bought me when I was about 7. From that point on, all I wanted to do is draw comics. And specifically, superhero and science fiction comics. Basically I used to copy comic books, and draw my own comics on scrap paper.

There are great comic books, these great geniuses that manage to tell you a story in one frame, and that became the thing that opened my eyes.

There is a scene in one comic from the '60s-'70s where Batman finds a film, a newsreel film, of his father. This newsreel film is from the '50s, and his father has come to this costume ball in a Zorro costume, which strangely enough looks a lot like a Batman suit in the footage.

I was an enormous fan of Dan Slott's run, and John Byrne's run was a big deal for me. I found Slott's version of 'She-Hulk' first, and then I went back and looked up some of the older stuff because I liked it so much. And it was so good. It was perfect. It was my perfect comic book at the time that I found it.

I was a comic book nut and grew up on 'Star Wars' and 'Indiana Jones.'

There's no white comic that sells tickets to black people like me. They're going to get their hair done, get a new outfit, and come out to see a white dude.

Hollywood loves pre-validation. Even if someone has a property that was first published as a comic book that sold only 5,000 copies, for Hollywood, that is a stamp of approval. 'Oh, it was already published in another medium? Must be good!' They get assurance from knowing that someone else already took the risk.

I'm not a really big comic book person. I know the typical ones - 'Spider-Man' and 'Wonder Woman' and 'Storm' and that stuff. But don't quiz me, because I'm not good at things like that.

Artists forget than the first purpose of a comic character is to convey emotion. Everything else, like realism, or other kinds of virtuosity, is an optional extra. If you sacrifice expression for the sake of other concerns, you're putting the cart before the horse.

We probably put about four or five comic books out a year and probably about two or three art books and various trade paperbacks - maybe four or five of those a year - and that's what we do now.

I created 'Captain Underpants' when I was in the second grade. I was constantly getting in trouble for being the class clown, so my teacher sent me out into the hallway to punish me. It was there in the hall that I began drawing 'Captain Underpants'. Soon I was making my own comic books about him.

I think readers are always patient. Look at the 'Harry Potter' series. Some have given up on this generation of kids as game and TV addicts, but lots of people spend lots of time patiently reading through hundreds of pages of dense prose. I think reading a comic by comparison is a lot more immediate.

I love 'The X-Men;' that was the first comic series that I was dedicated to, because I feel like you can pick your player. 'I'm the most like Gambit... or I'm totally a Storm.'

I don't say that I'm going to be like every other comic that's blue, or gratuitous use of language. I do try to have my own standards: I don't do everything the audience wants, and I do try to surprise them.

I feel when a writer treats a character as 'precious,' the writer runs the risk of turning them into a comic book character. There's nothing wrong with comic book characters in comic books, but I don't write comic books.

We're comic. We're all comics. We live in a comic time. And the worse it gets the more comic we are.

As a comic, I used to know more about pop culture.

I also love the zombie genre, my zombie fandom going way back to 'Night of the Living Dead.' And 'The Walking Dead' is truly the ultimate representation of that sensibility in the comic book genre.

Superman has evolved continually in the comic books over the course of 75 years. He couldn't even fly for years in the original comic books. Kryptonite wasn't added until the '60s. All sorts of things like this. If a character is going to remain vital, he does have to change with the times.

When I was a kid, back in the '40s, I was a voracious comic book reader. And at that time, there was a lot of patriotism in the comics. They were called things like 'All-American Comics' or 'Star-Spangled Comics' or things like that. I decided to do a logo that was a parody of those comics, with 'American' as the first word.

I think the problems with comedians that are political, and there are some brilliant ones, are the ones that offer no solutions. Not that there's a moral obligation for a comic to fix things, but I like to see a comic that's upset about something and offer a solution. It can be a funny solution. I like to see the thought process.

Dennis the Menace was probably the most realistic comic book ever done. No space aliens ever invaded!

Comic books and graphic novels are a great medium. It's incredibly underused.

If you record the world honestly, there's no way people can stop being funny. A lot of fiction writing doesn't get that idea, as if to acknowledge it would trivialize the story or trivialize human nature, when in fact human nature is reduced and falsified if the comic aspects are not included.

To get syndicated as a comic strip artist is as likely as winning the lottery.

Cartoonists create so many cartoons on any given topic that we can follow the life cycle of a comic idea and how it evolves over time more quickly than we can with a form like the novel.

I can say pretty confidently that I am not the right guy to do a superhero movie, just because I was not a comic book kid. I don't know that mythology, and I don't have it ingrained in me in the way that a lot of these other directors do.

We're kind of the comic relief of this movie because most of the stories are very dark. And that's why these plays were so great, because it's such a dark, dark universe that it becomes funny because it's just too pathetic.

There's a famous tension between Green Lantern and Green Arrow in the comic books. Those guys have always been friends. They started off as not on the same page, and then they quickly became best friends.

You can't teach someone to be funny, but you can teach comic timing. If you listen to a good comic, you can learn how to put it on a page.

It was pure guesswork on my part back in 1979 as to whether I would have the stamina to write, pencil, ink, letter, tone, and fill the back of a monthly comic book for 26 years.

In America, there's a very long tradition of a comic strip that comes in newspapers, which is not true all over the world. To sell papers, they put color comics in.

I wasn't at all sure I could make that sort of leap into that sort of comic book reality.

NBC anchor Brian Williams is a standup comic in disguise.

I would love to do something like Austin Powers to show off my comic timing.

I grew up on the old EC comic books before the Comics Code in North American and with all sort of good-natured fun. I never had nightmares I think because all of the old horror stuff that I was exposed to was well meaning in a certain sense.

If you're a guy who's always been the fun-to-be-around teddy bear, then all of a sudden people are viewing you as sexy, it's nice. It's great not having to be the plucky best friend or the comic relief anymore - I love that.

I want to read a lot of comic books. I want to watch movies. I want to rest.

What I had noticed is that there weren't a lot of women lining up to see a comic book movie, but they were going to line up to see 'The Devil Wears Prada,' which may have been something I wanted to address.

Comic books are a big passion of mine.

I'm totally open to it being a movie or a television series or whatever, but truthfully, if no one wants to do it right, I'm also happy for 'Ex Machina' to only ever exist as a comic book.

I guess people might be surprised to know I read comic books. I'm a Marvel girl, as opposed to DC.

Everything I've done is an old Marvel comic in its' own way.

I used to write in school a lot; I always liked it and used to write on my own, comic books, come up with alternate story lines to the stuff I watched and read, a lot of books and TV, episodes of 'Twilight Zone.' I didn't think about it.

I had amazing intellectual privilege as a kid. My mom taught me to read when I was two or three. When I was five, I read and wrote well enough to do my nine-year older brother's homework in exchange for chocolate or cigarettes. By the time I was 10, I was reading Orwell, Tolstoy's 'War and Peace,' and the Koran. I was reading comic books, too.

Books is our main type of content, but we include user-generated content and will include other verticals such as scientific papers, sheet music, and comic books.

I didn't expect 'Scott Pilgrim' to be successful. I just made this weird comic to entertain my friends.

I'm a comic writer, in some ways, and a comic person when I'm up at a podium, in order to disguise the fact that in my heart I'm disgustingly earnest.

The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.

When you're onstage with Chris Rock, anything can happen. He is one of the greatest comic geniuses we've ever seen.

My theater nerd world and my comic friend world are colliding... That's the thing that I was nerdy about, was theatre. I wasn't as much into the comic book stuff. So it's fun to see there are people that are into that that are also theatre nerds like me.

Not being a comic book fan, being thrown into that and seeing the extreme - it's taken very seriously. So I tried to do as much learning as I could about it so I wasn't mean or anything.

My brother is a comic-book writer, and I was always in love with comics.

Well, I'm always working on my comic strip and trying to, you know, keep cranking that out.

A good comedy's very hard to make, so good comic writing I really enjoy.

I'm not a joke guy; I'm not a stand-up comic.

A comic can be aesthetically beautiful. I think they captured it beautifully and accurately.

All comic books take place in built environments, and I was very good at drawing people and animals, and stuff like that, but I hadn't spent much energy drawing buildings. So I thought, maybe I could, and then I became an architect.

I tend to only read comics written by friends or people I've known. And I'm not a great comic reader.

I wrote the original Mike Hammer as a comic, Mike Danger.

Kafka is still unrecognized. He thought he was a comic writer.