Graphic Novel Quotes & Sayings

I think with something like 'Watchmen' you can genuinely call that a graphic novel because it has the weight and the intent of a proper novel and it also is the complete story. — Dave Gibbons

You can make your superhero a psychopath, you can draw gut-splattering violence, and you can call it a "graphic novel," but comic books are still incredibly stupid. — Bill Watterson

Just in terms of being able to be a professional artist, but also it's nice to not have to dread introductions. "What you do for a living?" It used to be easier just to tell people that I was a magazine illustrator than try to explain that I did comics, but not the kind of comics that they were used to, and no, it's not pornography, etc. And now people even of our parents' generation are familiar with the term "graphic novel," which is kind of amazing. — Adrian Tomine

Whosoever holds this hammer, if he be worthy, shall possess the power of Thor. — Stan Lee

'Just looking at pictures' used to be considered cheating. No longer. The graphic novel is booming. Comics, heavily illustrated texts, books with no words are now accepted as reading. — Jon Scieszka

The ability to get inside your character's head in a graphic novel is really fun and useful because one, you can really define the character's voice and two, it's a way easier way to convey what the character's thinking by actually laying out what he's thinking. — Eric Kripke

Every time you look up at the stars, it's like opening a door. You could be anyone, anywhere. You could be yourself at any moment in your life. You open that door and you realize you're the same person under the same stars. Camping out in the backyard with your best friend, eleven years old. Sixteen, driving alone, stopping at the edge of the city, looking up at the same stars. Walking a wooded path, kissing in the moonlight, look up and you're eleven again. Chasing cats in a tiny town, you're eleven again, you're sixteen again. You're in a rowboat. You're staring out the back of a car. Out here where the world begins and ends, it's like nothing ever stops happening. — Bryan Lee O'Malley

People who are too sensitive go crazy, remember that — Paul Pope

But I was right and the real world seemed increasingly nonsensical. Why train for years to do a job you bitched about all day? Didn't it make more sense to follow your dreams and maybe do a little good at the same time? I didn't want to be a lawyer or a bank manager or a goddamn burger flipper. We only get one life and I wanted mine to be exciting ... — Mark Millar

Considering my specialization in architecture, I'm not surprised that the first graphic novel to thoroughly engage, not to say captivate, me is Chip Kidd and Dave Taylor's 'Batman: Death by Design.' — Martin Filler

In my head, the 5 issues of A Spoon Too Short comprise one novel: a 100 page graphic novel sequel to Douglas' two Dirk books, taking some of the ideas he was working on before he died, and a whole bunch of new stuff from me and a little from Max Landis (who is the Executive Producer on the book as well as writing the forthcoming TV series). — Arvind Ethan David

That's the exciting part about capitalism. It's like surfing, you have to catch the wave. - Martin Peter (aka Vermin Gobsmack) — Jamie Delano

I knew that we'd have a big following because the graphic novel [ The Walking Dead] is so popular, and I knew that with Frank Darabont and Gale Ann Hurd at the helm that we were doing something very special. — Laurie Holden

Life is too short to be spent doing just one thing! — Radkris

Sometimes just looking into a person's eyes can tell a graphic story and a brilliant novel if you have the ability to turn it into words. — L.L. Caulton

When you work on a graphic novel or a film with people you've been together through a lot and you've exposed your secrets and weaker sides to each other. — Etgar Keret

I think there's as much violence, in a way, as a scene with two women having a cup of coffee in a Ruth Rendell novel - in terms of emotional violence and the violence you can inflict with language - as there is in the most graphic kind of serial killer/slasher novel you can think of. — Mark Billingham

Everything in life has a price; each choice we make is a transaction.
It's only with the passage of time that we realize sometimes much to our regret whether the cost was worth it. — David Hontiveros

Graphic novel genre become really quite popular. It's really a big screen film genre that they have successfully moved into the small screen. — Dustin Clare

The script for what would eventually become my first graphic novel, 'Cairo,' sort of came to me in kind of a bolt of lightning within 24 hours of having moved to that city. Just a jumble of characters and narratives and interesting things that I was seeing and experiencing for the first time. — G. Willow Wilson

When I get interested in a new topic I teach a class on it. There's a graduate seminar I teach in which the students and I try to expand the terminology we use to talk about poetry as well as expand our notion of what makes a poem - we read source texts on architecture, dance, photography, film and the graphic novel. — Matthea Harvey

Live a LOT to get better material. Let yourself feel everything — Laura Lee Gulledge

Don't say I'm lucky. Ever. — Faith Erin Hicks

I'm sure this is a diversionary ploy. But that doesn't mean it isn't real.
-Abe Sapien — John Arcudi

True. The school admin decided that a girls clothes were more important than her education. — Svetlana Chmakova

Maybe I'll really try to kiss her, even if I fall through her like a raindrop. — James B. Willard

Comics are actually dubbed by euphemistic label of graphic novel, which became a big deal. — Francoise Mouly

Sqwaak!" from Fletcher, the environmental crime fighting parrot in The Big Belch graphic novel by Kay Wood. — Kay Wood

Throughout these pages, my brush weeps in sorrow for what happened in Tiananmen Square.

Not for the first time, a government was turning the guns on its people. Has the world learned nothing from history? — Morgan Chua

I think there's something to the idea that the divine dwells more easily in text than in images. Text allows for more abstract thought, more of a separation between you and the physical world, more room for you and God to meet in the middle. I find it hard enough to conceive of an infinite being. Imagine if those original scrolls came in the form of a graphic novel with pictures of the Lord? I'd never come close to communing with the divine. — A. J. Jacobs

Our fine Governor called me here to ask me to talk to you
said you didn't seem too happy here. He knows we're pals. He wanted me to just
I don't know, make sure you weren't going to cause any trouble or something. — Robert Kirkman

I was a serious comic collector and fanboy as a kid. I wanted very badly to draw comic books for a lot of my childhood and early adolescence. So when you have an unfulfilled dream like that, when years later you find yourself in a position to make a graphic novel - hell yeah, I'm going to do that. — Anthony Bourdain

If formality and courtesy take over the feelings . . . how silly and meaningless these things could become. And despite all this, I still take part in it! — Fumio Obata

I think the problem with the term graphic novel is it sounds pompous, it sounds pretentious, whereas on the continent, they call it an album, which to me sounds, it's got more much of a connotation of a kind of a music single and an album collection. — Dave Gibbons

I lose patience with long stories. I get people who go, "Crumb, do some long stories, do a graphic novel." Novel-schmovel. — Robert Crumb

It would ha' been a good deal easier, if ye'd only been a witch. — Diana Gabaldon

You retain the Ki. Whether or not you become a warrior is for you to discover. — Richard Finney

Alice: I didn't know that cheshire cats grinned. In fact, I didn't know that cats could grin.
Duchess: They can, and most of 'em do. — Rod Espinosa

I've no objection to the term 'graphic novel,' as long as what it is talking about is actually some sort of graphic work that could conceivably be described as a novel. My main objection to the term is that usually it means a collection of six issues of Spider-Man, or something that does not have the structure or any of the qualities of a novel, but is perhaps roughly the same size. — Alan Moore

We [Rodriguez and Frank Miller] wanted to take the movies and turn them into a graphic novel, so that people wouldn't even know what they were looking at. It's still visual storytelling, but it's approached completely different. The two mediums don't have to be separate mediums. They can be one and the same. — Robert Rodriguez

I've been drawing since I could hold a pencil. I've got many ideas that are still to be drawn out, but the couple collaborations in development are with other actor/writers for graphic novel/comic that could potentially become a film project. — Jade Hassoune

I think that people are really hungry for original content. I think there's a sense of reboots and remakes, and we're lacking in any sense of originality in media. So, I think the people who want something like this which has a graphic novel feel or comic book feel but that is designed and created for the medium of television, I think that is something is very appealing to a lot of people. — Miles Millar

To me any given story has its appropriate form. There might be some story I get involved with that's begging to be a graphic novel, so that will have to be that way. — Dave Eggers

Cheap! But not as cheap as your girlfriend. — Warren Ellis

You start to get nervous when the value of a comic book or graphic novel is relative to the achievements of some other medium. — Adrian Tomine

After being dry for a couple a weeks, three cocktails went down quicker than a boner in a busted rubber. — Brian Azzarello

In the '40s and '50s, a lot of teachers and librarians saw the graphic novel as the enemy of reading. — Gene Luen Yang

The one who's afraid has already lost. — Elisabetta Gnone

A man's life will not come again, once it has slipped through his teeth. And no power on earth can bring it back. This is the mortal law. Then no longer will his bones be held together by wet sinews. Then no longer the soul flutter in his mouth. But by Death's blazing light, he is ground out and spent. — Paul Pope

I felt there was a certain amount of violence in the graphic and that it could still be cheated on screen so you could still have a hard PG-13 and open up your audience. Anybody can read the graphic novel. If you're 14, you can go out and buy it, and I felt that if you're 14 you should be able to see this movie [The Loosers]. — Sylvain White

Please read this [book] so I'll have someone to talk about it with? I'll get you cigarettes. — Fiona Staples

Personally, I'd never seen a graphic novel. I knew they existed because friends of mine like Jonathan Ross collect them and some very literate and intelligent people really rate the graphic novel as a form. — Stephen Fry

What if . . . What if I am stupid? Like people say? — Svetlana Chmakova

The book is almost always better than the movie. You could have no better case in point than FROM HELL, Alan Moore's best graphic novel to date, brilliantly illustrated by Eddie Campbell. It's hard to describe just how much better the book is.
It's like, "If the movie was an episode of Battlestar Galactica with a guest appearance by the Smurfs and everyone spoke Dutch, the graphic novel is Citizen Kane with added sex scenes and music by your favourite ten bands and everyone in the world you ever hated dies at the end."
That's how much better it is. — Warren Ellis

There is a madness, yes, this is true. Few mortals possess it, the willingness to step away from the protection of sanity. To walk into the wild wood of madness ... — Neil Gaiman

I, the great and powerful D.S. will create a harem for all the women in the world!!!! For a woman, no greater joy exists in the entire universe than to fuck me, the ultimate sex symbol!!! — Kazushi Hagiwara

One way of understanding a graphic novel is that it's an ambitious comic and one way or another my comics have had ambitions. I have no problem with escapism. When I get my depressions all I want to do is escape reality. — Art Spiegelman

I first became an Alan Moore fan in Covent Garden on a Saturday afternoon in 1987, when I bought a copy of 'Watchmen,' his graphic novel about ageing superheroes and nuclear apocalypse. — Susanna Clarke

Peabody waved her PPC triumphantly. "It's the Kirk thing, The Enterprise thing. It reminded me I'd hit this name that made me snicker when I was running the van - the Cargo. Here it is. Tony Stark."
"Oh, baby." McNab blew her a double-handed kiss. "Good call."
"It's gotta be, right?" Peabody said to McNab. "It's his style."
"Who the hell is Tony Stark?" Eve demanded.
"Iron Man," Roarke told her. "Superhero, genius, innovative engineer, and billionaire playboy."
"Iron Man? You're talking about a comic book guy?"
"Graphic novel," Roarke and McNab said together. — J.D. Robb

People are so afraid to say the word 'comic'. It makes you think of a grown man with pimples, a ponytail and a big belly. Change it to 'graphic novel' and that disappears. — Marjane Satrapi

I love print fiction, but sometimes when I'm reading a good graphic novel or manga, I find myself envying those who work in an illustrated format. — Jane Lindskold

To all those whom seek the iron words of the community: if your book is good, it will stand on its own. Be it a short story, a novel, a novella, a chapter book, a poetry book, a chapbook, a manga or a graphic novel ... it will seek reviews by itself. You need to do nothing with it. Do nothing but write. Give up review seeking and focus on writing, for that is what becomes you in the end. — L'Poni Baldwin

Every day that we can open our eyes and take a look at the world around us, is another day to be thankful for. It's a chance to remember how far we've come, and to remember how we did it -- by being honest with ourselves about who we are and what we've done. By letting hope back into our lives, and learning to lean on those who care when we're too weak to stand on our own two feet.

It hasn't been easy, and it never will be. After all, every day is also a chance to slide back into the darkness. To live in ourselves and our regrets, instead of this moment. To run away from those that would help us and let self-hatred drive us back into isolation, despair, and destruction.

So let's make a promise this morning -- that we will spend today with our eyes fixed forward.

Step by step, we will do things that help make life better, for ourselves and those around us. Because just as they have forgiven us -- we must also forgive ourselves. — Nick Spencer

When you hold a graphic novel in your hands, you're holding artist blood made ink. — Molly Crabapple

I would love to collaborate on a graphic novel with an artist - I'm terrible at drawing but I really love that genre. — Matthea Harvey

A typical twenty-page short story would work quite well as a graphic novel. A single graphic novel of maybe 120 pages would condense down into a short story quite nicely. — Richard K. Morgan

'Luther' is absolutely a monster-of-the-week show. Although it's post-watershed and is rendered in intense graphic novel-style images, it's inspiration is not that different from 'Doctor Who' as in both cases you've got a trickster figure who fights the monster of the week and is eventually successful. — Neil Cross

And that to me is something. Coming to an understanding of who you are in the midst of discovering who you aren't. — Brian Azzarello

The language in a comic book or a graphic novel and the cinematographic language are really not the same language. They are false brother and sister. It's not at all the same. — Marjane Satrapi

Life has a time limit. And we are changing all the time. So are our ambitions, desires, and purposes . . . The important thing is to find something that never changes in you. — Fumio Obata

That pompous phrase (graphic novel) was thought up by some idiot in the marketing department of DC. I prefer to call them Big Expensive Comics. — Alan Moore

When I put together a graphic novel, I don't think about literary prose. I think about storytelling. — Ted Rall

Every goodbye calls for preparation, but most times, life takes us by surprise. — Elisabetta Gnone

When the worst that can happen already has, there's not much left to be afraid of anymore,right? — Ian Sta. Maria

If I had to rank my skills, I have a long way to go before I can write a good graphic novel. — Ted Rall

By the time you figure out how the world really works, you've already lost about everything you'd hope to keep — Paul Pope

'Diary of a Teenage Girl' was my first American movie. It was my first movie in an American accent. It's based on a graphic novel, which was written in 2002 by someone called Phoebe Gloeckner. It was turned into a play by Marielle Heller, who then wrote it as a screenplay for Sundance Labs. — Bel Powley

I don't think anyone has written a great graphic novel. — Ted Rall

Playing Destroyo, who was sort of a Silence Of The Lambs type character, I'd say I was wearing about 50 pounds of rubber and foam rubber and makeup. But I had no idea who The Tick was. I'm not a big graphic-novel guy. I don't even know if The Tick was a graphic novel! — Kurt Fuller

I don't want to leave. — Svetlana Chmakova

Boomerang arrow, Kate
It comes back to you in the end. Boomerang. Respect it. — Matt Fraction

I'm a graphic-novel guy. I can't handle the wait for monthly or bi-monthly comics; I need the story finished so I can buy the whole thing. — Chris Wooding

I often notice how students can gain the capacity to use certain critical methodologies through engaging with very different texts - how a graphic novel about gentrification and an anthology about Hurricane Katrina and a journalistic account of war profiteering might all lead to very similar classroom conversations and critical engagement. I'm particularly interested in this when teaching law students who often resist reading interdisciplinary materials or materials they interpret as too theoretical. — Dean Spade

I want to get to know this other me, but I don't know her well enough yet to be her all the time — Laura Lee Gulledge

To me, one of the big fears of doing a big huge graphic novel is locking yourself into one style and getting halfway through it and going, 'Oh I made the wrong choice,' which is a recurring nightmare I have. — Adrian Tomine

Julio's Day is a story of one man's life, but it's a great more than that as well. It's the story of the life of a century, also told as if a day. Beginning with Julio's birth in 1900 and ending with his death in 2000, the graphic novel touches on most of the major events that shaped the 20th century. — Brian Evenson

My mom says . . . there are bad people who hurt others for fun . . . and there are good people who do it by accident. Like, they make a mistake?

I think you're a good person. — Svetlana Chmakova

For 'American Born Chinese,' my first graphic novel with First Second Books, I did mostly 'memory' research. It's fiction, but I pulled heavily from my own childhood. — Gene Luen Yang

You see, Evey, all the world's a stage. And everything else ...
... is vaudeville. — Alan Moore

I never wanted to make a graphic novel. As soon as you become a 'writer,' you have to be intelligent all the time ... I like the fact that I have the right once in a while to say silly things. — Marjane Satrapi

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

Would any of you like to share your career aspirations within the class? Jim?

I dunno, to be honest, I was just hoping to be able to keep the demons away... — Jillian Tamaki

If a novel doesn't have well-developed three-dimensional principal characters, wouldn't it be a graphic novel without the graphics? — Michael Kroft

I don't like 'graphic novel.' It's a word that publishers created for the bourgeois to read comics without feeling bad. Comics is just a way of narrating - it's just a media type. — Marjane Satrapi

I've got an original graphic novel called 'The Indian and the Bandit' that I'm writing with a childhood friend. — Michael McMillian

I wrote a graphic novel called 'Soul Stealer' with big, beautiful, epic artwork by Chris Shy. It grew into a trilogy. — Michael Easton

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

That partially due to the world of media and commerce, the idea of a comic book has been lost in the ghetto, whereas the graphic novel is now being held up as something to aspire to and as something that's respectable for adults to read. — Adrian Tomine

Death is complicated."

-Johann Kraus — John Arcudi

We are told to remember the idea and not the man. Because a man can fail. He can be caught, he can be killed and forgotten. But 400 years later, an idea can still change the world. I have witnessed firsthand the power of ideas. I've seen people kill in the name of them. But you cannot kiss an idea ... cannot touch it or hold it.
Ideas do not bleed. They do not feel pain. They do not love. And it is not an idea that I miss. It is a man.
A man that made me remember the 5th of November. A man that I will never forget. — Alan Moore