Jim Woodring Quotes & Sayings

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

The 10's(2010) are a baby kangaroo, a bill overdue, a coal chute for staggering millions, a bowl of camphor punch, the fast-dissolving afterimages of a long night's exhausting dreams. Boys and girls, take off those space suits; the boot is lifted from your chest and you can safely resume the search for perfection. — Jim Woodring

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

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

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

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

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

Comics could use more creators with something worthwhile to say. — Jim Woodring

Alternative cartoonists have to rely on comic book stores to get their stuff in the hands of readers. — Jim Woodring

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

In a long story like 'Weathercraft,' it becomes kind of convoluted. It can become perhaps difficult to remember what led up to whatever point you're at. I worried a little bit about people being able to keep the shape of the story in their heads while they were reading it, and not wonder how they got wherever they were. — Jim Woodring

I'm not a freak. I'm not really crazy or anything. I don't think I'm really abnormal. It's just, like anybody else, I have interests I cultivate, and one of my interests is not getting too used to things. I've sacrificed a lot of things in my life in order to keep that sense of things being unfamiliar. — Jim Woodring

I don't believe in art like I used to. I believe in something beyond it, something that contains art and everything else. But I just don't quite have the nerve to chuck drawing and painting. Part of it is that I enjoy it too much, and part is that I don't have the courage to renounce the world. I don't want to move out of this nice neighborhood so that I can live in a shed and devote myself to meditating and touching something I can't feel. I'm addicted to the fun of playing in the world. — Jim Woodring

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

People aren't interested in seeing themselves as they really are. — Jim Woodring

I think that cartoons have a lot more power than they're given credit for. — Jim Woodring

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

It takes more drawing to tell a story in pantomime. — Jim Woodring

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

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

A tree is an incomprehensible mystery. — Jim Woodring

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

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

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

I used to publish these stories in 32-page comics, and I would either do short stories or break the long ones up into chunks so there would be some variety inside the comic. But since then, people have been doing more and more long, standalone works, and the term 'graphic novel' has sort of become the codified term now. — Jim Woodring

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

Everything I do tries to do the same thing, which is to express things that are hard to express, hidden things. — Jim Woodring

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

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

To my way of thinking, the concept drawings that Rembrandt did, the drawings he made that he used to model his artists, to work out the compositions of his paintings: those are cartoons. Look at his sketch for the return of the prodigal son. The expression on the angry younger brother's face. The head is down; the eyebrow is just one curved line over the eyes. It communicates in a very shorthand way. It's beautiful, expressive, and, in a peculiar way, it's more powerful than the kind of stilted, formalized expression in the final painting. — Jim Woodring

Dear Supreme Altruist-

I hope you are in a receptive mood.

Thanks very much for placing wihin me the bomb that never stops exploding. Though the benefits have been intangible and in fact I feel that this terrifying mechanism has generally made my life intolerable, I shall never ask you to reverse the situation. I feel I have done everything that may be reasonably expected of me in the way of self-abnegation. However, I now find to my dismay that my lifelong fear of death is beginning to desert me. I believe that this may mean that the bomb's continual explosions may be causing the growth of new slabs of man-bark instead of blasting the loathesome stuff away as it has been doing.

I therefore humbly request that the explosive power of the bomb be increased. Please do not make me weaker; make the bomb stronger.

Amen. — Jim Woodring

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

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