Ron Goulart Quotes

Such is the nature of comic strips. Once established, their half-life is usually more than nuclear waste. Typically, the end result is lazy, rich cartoonists.

I could draw Bloom County with my nose and pay my cleaning lady to write it, and I'd bet I wouldn't lose 10% of my papers over the next twenty years. Such is the nature of comic-strips. Once established, their half-life is usually more than nuclear waste.

There's no limitation on comics, nothing. From a logical standpoint, how can there be a limitation on comics? You can use any word in the dictionary. You can put them in any order you want to. You can use a vast variety of illustrating styles. People could do all sorts of things.

I never saw myself so much as an actor. I wanted to be a cartoonist like Charles M. Schulz and create my own world and be able to have a studio at home and not commute and be able to be with my family.

I was the founder of the 'Cartoon Bank' in the '90s. I was interested in finding ways for cartoonists to supplement their incomes.

The thing with the comics is that you have license to go down every alley your brain can think of.

It used to be if you wanted to do a newspaper comic, you had to appeal to a pretty big chunk of the newspaper's readership for them to want to keep you around. 'Dilbert' would be office humor, but even that is pretty widely experienced.

Manga, as a medium, is very different from cinema. Its creators are free to express themselves with harsh, cruel stories, and they enjoy vast distribution throughout Japan.

Comics are words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures.

Cartooning is an artistic commitment that requires the full attention and passion of the artist on every level; one should not get into it if one expects to do anything more than produce a book or a story that is exactly as one wants it to be.

Picasso has a volatile, explosive presence. He seems to take art back to an earlier function, before the centuries of museums and masterpieces; he is the artist as clown, as conjurer, as master funmaker.

And yet, the only exciting life is the imaginary one.

The artist is still a little like the old court jester. He's supposed to speak his vicious paradoxes with some sense in them, but he isn't part of whatever the fabric is that makes a nation.

A sweeping statement is the only statement worth listening to. The critic without faith gives balanced opinions, usually about second-rate writers.

You have to know the rules, otherwise you have no tools to communicate to the audience, but to keep it fresh you have to break some. I don't choose genres as the element, but the material itself is the element, then I'll decide what genre I need. That's just how I work.

Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones.

We're still at a point where women [directors] aren't allowed to be mad visionaries. We have to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that we're responsible, that we can handle it, that we've got all our ducks in a row . . . most women who direct always come in on budget, always come in on schedule, and if they were wild and irresponsible it would not be put down to brilliance, but to a general flakiness.

There are always a bunch of ideas floating around and I do the best that I can to try to not do them. The ideas don't go away and, over time, are finally like, "Okay, it's been around so long, I have to get this thing out," and it somehow ends up coming to some version of fruition.

If Mozart had power tools, there's no telling how great his music might have been.

Everybody's career is different. In this new age of being able to talk to the whole world at once, the possibilities are staggering, really, to be able to do things yourself. But I've always enjoyed my relationship with the record company.

I guess I prefer to play live, but I don't want to have only live CDs. I like playing live because there are alot of things that can happen. I can interact with the audience and say some things to get me in trouble. On the other hand, the studio is nice because you can really take your time and make something that you know is the best thing that you can ever do. But nothing beats being up on stage in front of all that energy.

When you're writing fiction, you don't have notes necessarily. You don't carve it, it's not like a piece of sculpture, it's more like water color.

From the very beginning, we bucked tradition. When the experts said that something was "always done" in a certain way, we'd do it our way, which was sometimes the very opposite.

I found that many gifted people are so afraid of writing a poor story that they cannot summon the nerve to write a single sentence for months. The thing to say to such people is: "See how *bad* a story you can write. See how dull you can be. Go ahead. That would be fun and interesting. I will give you ten dollars if you can write something thoroughly dull from beginning to end!" And of course, no one can.