Comics seem to be cooking these days. It's like being a rock star.

Art Spiegelman (born February 15, 1948) is an American comics artist, editor, and advocate for the medium of comics, best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning comic memoir, Maus.

Quotes

• What Franz Kafka was to the first half of the 20th century, Philip K. Dick is to the second half.
  • As quoted in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick : Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings (1995) edited by Lawrence Sutin, p. x.

• A manifesto, a diary, a crumpled suicide note, and a still relevant love letter.
  • On his work Breakdowns : A Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@?*! (1978; 2008) as quoted in "Art Spiegelman on ‘Breakdowns’ Redux and the Dark Side of Tina Fey" by Rebecca Milzoff in New York magazine (8 October 2008).

• There's a therapeutic aspect to all making, but the nature of working is to compress, condense, and shape stuff, not to just expunge it. It's not just an exorcism.
  • As quoted in "Art Spiegelman on ‘Breakdowns’ Redux and the Dark Side of Tina Fey" by Rebecca Milzoff in New York magazine (8 October 2008).

• I guess I don’t subscribe to the twee school. I remember trying to lose our copy of Thomas the Tank Engine before I had to read it again. Life is a more dimensional and interesting affair than vestigially Victorian notions of childhood. I was trying to make something substantial, something to be read and reread.
  • On his book Jack and the Box, as quoted in "Smart Art : Spiegelman doesn’t dumb down for kids" by Alexandra Zissu in New York Magazine (16 November 2008).

• I became a philosophy major literally to understand why I should put up with this shit.
  • After taking all the difficult art classes, Spiegelman was required to take the easy ones to obtain an arts major. He discusses here switching instead to a philosophy major; as quoted in "Breakfast with the FT: Art Spiegelman 'Drawn from Memory'" in Financial Times (29 November 2008).

• I was asking the school shrink, 'Has anyone ever told you the top of your head looks like a penis?' I thought that was a really funny thing to tell a bald shrink.
  • As quoted in "Breakfast with the FT: Art Spiegelman 'Drawn from Memory'" in Financial Times (29 November 2008).

• Comics seem to be cooking these days. It's like being a rock star.
  • As quoted in "Breakfast with the FT: Art Spiegelman 'Drawn from Memory'" in Financial Times (29 November 2008).

External links

• Interview with New York Times Magazine