Mark Mothersbaugh Quotes

I had never really thought of myself as a writer; any writing I had done was just to give myself something to draw.

I was writing and cartooning and writing short stories from grade school on.

The exciting thing about doing art for someone else's story is how I can translate their world through pictures, and that's always a pretty big challenge.

I know it may sound silly, but I think my short stories have a life and identity of their own. They crop up in all sorts of places.

I try and make little stories. Whether it's with a pencil or with bits of records, it's really the same thing.

I may attempt a novel. I think that no matter what you write, it requires being honest with oneself, and you have to pull yourself out of the whirlwind of daily life.

I don't think I'd have the stamina, skill or ability to write a novel, but I'd love to write short stories and poetry, because those are my two passions.

I work on words, mostly, toward them being poetry or short stories, and then some of those become songs. They all find their place in the world, but they all start off in the same place. I'm always painting and drawing as well, and it's an ongoing creative assignment.

Well, everything surprises me about the writing process because illustrating comes much more naturally to me than writing does.

That's the most amazing thing about writing, whether it's in prose or comics: that you can create something from nothing, and suddenly they come to life, like they've always been there.

I don't believe you just create a character out of thin air, there's always something of yourself you bring.

I have to write. I have to be an artist.

I've always liked writing. Even when I was in art school and thought I was going to be a gallery painter, I liked to pair my artwork with writing. And so that naturally led to drawing comics.

I draw plays every day.

You can be imaginative, you have the technology to convert your vision, you have the freedom to write the kind of stories you want to tell beyond the set formulas. Also, you have varied platforms to tell different kinds of stories.

When I was young, I would write all the time. Novels, plays, and poems. It's like a disease - my life is filled with fantasies, and I have to write them all down.

My mom is an artist and my own fiction is deeply visual.

I think my characters with my fingers, I think my characters with my guts. But when I say I think them, that is what I do, I feel them with the sympathetic neurons and I work out with my brain what it is that I am trying to write about, or I can't do it.

I started a novel in the back of a notebook, and it was great because it looked like I was taking notes. And I just, I kept it up, it was sort of fantasy, it was part soap opera. It was utterly dreadful, but that's how I got hooked.

When I was in college, I used to write little ditties and short stories and poetry for my friends. Writing a book is another thing. It is so much different from my traditional day of dirty fingernails and greasy hair and hot pans.

Whether you're starving in a garret or living in a castle like J. K. Rowling, I had this image of the author as a flawless, composed individual, serene in the knowledge they were creating art.

There is an element of autobiography in all fiction in that pain or distress, or pleasure, is based on the author's own. But in my case that is as far as it goes.

I've been writing stories since I was a kid. I love writing stories.

Where story comes from, I don't know. I know that I become obsessed with something. An idea, an image, a person, the way a person talks. And then something starts happening that I can't explain, and it has a lot to do with language.

A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.