The books that I do, the stories I write - I'm glad I'm able to do them, but they will quickly be swallowed up by the sands of time. Sometimes it frustrates me that I'm not able to do bigger, more important, more significant things. I guess you have to be content to do whatever it is you can do.

Jim Woodring

Categorized in : Book Writing Significant Things

People aren't interested in seeing themselves as they really are.

Jim Woodring

seeing people

Real shapes and real patterns are things you would observe in nature, like the marks on the back of a cobra's hood or the markings on a fish or a lizard. Imaginary shapes are just that, symbols that come to a person in dreams or reveries and are charged with meaning.

Jim Woodring

cobras real dream

When I was a kid, I used to see apparitions and have hallucinations, and my entire perception of the world was badly disoriented. And I had kind of a chaotic childhood because of that. I've really hung onto it, though. Because I actually like those feelings.

Jim Woodring

childhood feelings kids

I never experienced anything in my natural state that was as shocking as salvia divinorum`s effects. The condensed extract is murder. I'd smoked some plain leaf and experienced a very alien, very physical sensation, like wheels grinding against each other all over my body. Odd, not pleasant, but not overwhelming. Someone sent me some extract, and I took a big lungful, started counting, and before I reached twenty I was suddenly and without preamble in a completely altered state.

Jim Woodring

wheels twenties body

When I started formulating the first Frank comic, I knew I wanted it to be something that was beyond time and specific place. I felt that having the characters speak would tie it to 20th-century America, because that would be the idiom of the language they would use, the language I use.

Jim Woodring

ties character america

I'm not a freak. I'm not really crazy or anything. I don't think I'm really abnormal. It's just, like anybody else, I have interests I cultivate, and one of my interests is not getting too used to things. I've sacrificed a lot of things in my life in order to keep that sense of things being unfamiliar.

Jim Woodring

crazy order thinking

Doing a story about my mundane, waking life, how much I don't like my job, or breaking up with someone, I don't think so. Those stories don't interest me that much as a general thing.

Jim Woodring

waking-life jobs thinking

People for whom art is religion can say, "What I love about art is that it points to a higher reality." Well, fine, but the time comes when the smart thing for such a person to do is to let go of the fun of the art and get into the hard work of attaining and understanding that higher reality, unmixed with worldly games.

Jim Woodring

letting-go fun art

It takes more drawing to tell a story in pantomime.

Jim Woodring

pantomime drawing stories

Comics could use more creators with something worthwhile to say.

Jim Woodring

worthwhile creator use

Leslie Stein's comics give readers privileged access to a complete and wholly original world of gently skewed wonders.

Jim Woodring

wonder giving world

When I was setting out to be an artist, I said: If I can just produce one work that some people think is good, if I can become an obscure cult artist, that's all I want. Well, I attained that. I'm an obscure cult artist, and I think now, Why didn't I say I want to be another Picasso or something? What other options were open to me? But I was convinced I couldn't achieve great things because I don't have a steady-state mind.

Jim Woodring

artist people thinking

I've heard that Alfred Hitchcock said that by the time he was ready to shoot a film, he didn't even want to do it any more because he'd already had all of the fun of working it out. It's the same thing with these Frank comics.

Jim Woodring

want time fun

Every time I write something down I check it to see if it has that telltale glow, the glow that tells me there's something there. If it glows, it stays. Everything is either on or off.

Jim Woodring

glowing writing time

A tree is an incomprehensibl e mystery.

Jim Woodring

mystery nature tree

I don't believe in art like I used to. I believe in something beyond it, something that contains art and everything else. But I just don't quite have the nerve to chuck drawing and painting. Part of it is that I enjoy it too much, and part is that I don't have the courage to renounce the world. I don't want to move out of this nice neighborhood so that I can live in a shed and devote myself to meditating and touching something I can't feel. I'm addicted to the fun of playing in the world.

Jim Woodring

nice fun art

Oh, I was never a very big Jim Woodring fan. I've never thought his work was that great.

Jim Woodring

bigs fans

Alternative cartoonists have to rely on comic book stores to get their stuff in the hands of readers.

Jim Woodring

alternatives book hands

That Moorish architecture is all over the place, of course. It affects me everywhere I see it, as it does so many people. But Brand Library was a special place to me, and I know I've paid homage to it many times in my drawings.

Jim Woodring

drawing special people

One of the best memories of my life is contemplating that first finished drawing and realizing I had cracked the code, that I could make drawings like this whenever I wanted.

Jim Woodring

drawing memories firsts