33 Quotes by Will Eisner

Memory is a very amorphous thing. It is selective and shaped by emotion . . . people are constantly in pursuit of the details of their past because it is from that they determine their own identity upon which they can base their strategy of survival.

I believe that in spite of this courageous, not comic but tragic book by Will Eisner the story is hardly over. Yet it is a story very much worth telling, for one must fight the Big Lie and the hatred it spawns.

I did not have the dreams that the other artists working with me had, of 'moving uptown,' becoming an illustrator or a gallery painter, or those others who said, 'I'm going to go uptown and be a writer, I'm going to work for The New Yorker one day and escape this ghetto.' For me, there was no escape.

The work we do is as demanding as any of the great painters because nothing that happens on the page of a comic is accidental. It has to be imagined first in your mind before you do it. Those of us who know something about the art of painting know that working on a canvas, very often a lot of serendipitous things happen that work to the advantage of the painter ultimately.

I've spent my whole life working in a medium that was regarded with contempt largely because of historical reasons.

The term "comics" long ago became obsolete and inaccurate. It merely defined the content of the early joke-based comical strips. "Sequential Art" is a more accurate description of the form. I first suggested it because I believed something needed to be done to correct the feeling of inferiority by artists and writers in this field.

All professionals should teach at some time in their career because they are obliged to pass on what they have learned.

It's very important for me to maintain contact with the reader, because I'm writing to someone, and I'm desperately eager to achieve believability.

In comics, images are generally impressionistic. Usually, they are rendered with economy in order to facilitate their usefulness as a language. Because experience precedes analysis, the intellectual digestive process is accelerated by the imagery provided by comics.