Ted Naifeh Quotes

Cartoonists' dirty secret is that we tend to come up with stories that involve things that are really fun to draw.

To be an animator you have to be able to tell stories but I'm not very verbal - I definitely do it through pictures.

It's into the same bag as E.T. and Yoda, wherein you're trying to create something that people will actually believe, but it's not so much a symbol of the thing, but you're trying to do the thing itself.

I've been working with Disney all these years doing voice work, and now I'm signed with Disney Fine Arts, doing 'Beauty and the Beast' oil paintings. So it's been an ongoing wonderful job.

In creating the Harry Potter artwork, I try to bring a certain amount of realism and believability to the characters and setting, but still add an element of wonder and the unknown.

I am a 'made' cartoonist, but I was born a comic.

'War and Peas' by Michael Foreman, one of the great British children's illustrators. His watercolours are so lovely you could almost eat them, just as members of the target audience have been trying to do for decades.

All the pictures I could never do, I'll do it in comics. All the comics I do are the pictures I could never do.

Disney was not a good animator, he didn't draw well at all, but he was always a great idea man, and a good writer.

I like good stories above all else... and kickin' art really goes the final stretch to ensure a comic is good.

As a child, because manga was always around and I was reading it, I naturally thought, 'Hey, I'd like to draw manga - I'd like to be a manga author!'

Being a talented artist is good, it's nice, but it's not the most important thing. I think being a good storyteller, having a good idea, a good gag, is probably more important than being a great artist.

But to me what seems to be missing in a lot of portfolios is Cartooning.

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

The first things I remember drawing were battles - big sheets of paper covered in terrible scenes of carnage - though when you looked closely, there were little jokes and speech bubbles and odd things going on in the background.

There was a long stint during my childhood after I gave up on being a pro football player - we're talking sixth grade here - that I strongly considered a future writing and drawing comic books. I have been making stuff up ever since.

My freshman English professor at Kent State University in 1984 told me I was a good writer, and she loved all the silly pictures I drew in my notebook. She said I should try writing children's books, and so I did.

I'm interested in illustration in all its forms. Not only in books for children but in posters, prints and performance as a way of drawing people into books and stories.

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

My overall artistic goal is to marry graphic design with comic books and traditional storytelling.

My drawing skills probably froze around when I was 18... Now I'm more interested in the story, how the drawings, the layout can help express the stories and communicate them.

Cartooning is for people who can't quite draw and can't quite write. You combine the two half-talents and come up with a career.

I have been illustrating Tolkien's books ever since I first read them, long before illustration became my profession.

When our ancestors crouched about the camp fire at night, they told each other tales of gods and heroes, monsters and marvels, to hold back the terrors of the night. Such tales comforted and entertained, diverted and educated those who listened, and helped shape their sense of the world and their place in it.

A good comic explores the imagination, but it's always got to have those notes of truth running through it.