In my time, we had little league and junior league or whatever - before that, there's the sandlot. Kids played baseball wherever you can make a space. We played tackle-football on the street. Now we play basketball in the studio. We have a hoop. But we also have a pitching machine.
What social media has done - Facebook, Twitter - is show the audience. I don't have an audience. When I make my work, it just goes out into the ether. I have a thick skin and it just brings me down to earth, you know, to realize how out-there and far away and paltry the audience is that gets what I'm saying. It's depressing if I let it get to me. And it's the same with hanging a show, the way it's put up, like, three stories high and you can't read a single word.
Sometimes there's a vacuum that has to be covered.
Most writers do similar things in their minds. It's how the mind works, basically.
My work is more driven by the creative word. It's immersed in other writing and printed work, rather than drawn so much from life or past experience.
In communist Russia, their major organ was Pravda, which means "truth." The Russians knew how to read between the lines. They didn't take their literature literally.
Anyway, the way political history is passed down is influenced and spoiled by the closeness of the writers to the political figures that they're writing about. It's a sad state of affairs, but there's probably more veracity of reporting in my work than there is in the newspapers.
It's very rare that someone gets the death penalty for charges of conspiracy, for his influence, for his Svengali-Rasputin act.
I don't drive often, because the parking makes it too much of a nuisance. And I could never go back to commuting or anything. I'd just get fed up with it.
Whenever I reference something, it usually comes back at some point. I don't know why.
I don't have extravagant tastes or expenses - like with cars, clothes, or whatever.
It's inevitable that everyone's first drawing they draw is much like their fingerprint. It's inescapable that one has an identifiable style. It's not a major issue with me, but I never wanted to have a distinctive signature style so much.
No one can help me with my work. I think I do best when I am just left alone.
If you don't use an image now you might have a place to put it in further down the line - and I have a lot of unfinished drawings.
I don't know if it's good to be stuck at one place. I'm probably too close to home on that. Because that can happen-where I'm not the best judge of my own work.
There are lots of guns and action in my drawings, and part of that is just to make them more interesting. Because you can go through a whole film and it's mostly talking heads and little else until the action scenes, and they're usually violence or physical stuff. Same with baseball, or any sport. Except I find pitching and batting are visually very striking.
I don't feel that I decided deliberately I'm going to write something and have it stand alone. Somewhere by the end I think it would probably revert to imagery.
Back in the '80s, a lot of the images I used were from TV or from films on TV.
It's possible to do your best work at your highest level without competing. I'm not anticompetition, but at an individual level, it can be degrading for both sides. And it doesn't have to be that way. I've done pretty well at getting past that sort of thing, and it's a relief not to have the rancor.
There's always a latent or inferred image in my writing. And I can almost always assume if I do a drawing that it will eventually have text.
Anyone living, especially your peers, is a threat. You're judging them, they're judging you. This sort of criticism is as close to human nature as you can get. That can be a good thing sometimes. Jealously, rancor, competition, those can be good things in art. But it mostly puts you in a dangerous and disadvantageous position, and one that just takes away from you so much.
I don't want to express violence or anger or hate in my art. I want to express forgiveness.
Forgiveness is the nature of my art in general. It's expressing love and compassion, the kinds of things that don't make sense in any other context other than emotive expression.
I really don't see any influence of my work on any artists. But I do think I've had an influence on drawings' being shown. I've had an influence on the economics of it.
There are instances where lines in my work are borrowed or stolen from sources, mainly from books, or they become my own versions. A lot of the writing is my own, too. But if someone were to take each drawing and trace it back to its source, most of them could be traced back to a book or a text.
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