A collection of interesting quotes from last week:

“The best thing about writing fiction is that moment where the story catches fire and comes to life on the page, and suddenly it all makes sense and you know what it’s about and why you’re doing it and what these people are saying and doing, and you get to feel like both the creator and the audience. Everything is suddenly both obvious and surprising (‘but of course that’s why he was doing that, and that means that…’) and it’s magic and wonderful and strange.

“You don’t live there always when you write. Mostly it’s a long hard walk. Sometimes it’s a trudge through fog and you’re scared you’ve lost your way and can’t remember why you set out in the first place.

“But sometimes you fly, and that pays for everything.”

Neil Gaiman

***

“It was written to be disturbing. Any time someone’s being beaten, and it doesn’t have that aura of superhero derring-do…yeah, it’s going to be disturbing. It was supposed to be violent; it was supposed to be a complete reversal of what you’d expect, especially from a top-tier superhero book. I’d like to think that no one is reading New Avengers expecting to see a hero have their ass beat. If it was a crime book, or even in Powers, readers probably wouldn’t have even flinched, but you weren’t expecting it here and that was the point.”

Brian Michael Bendis on the Tigra beating in New Avengers #35

***

“… comics like Street Angel don’t have an equivalent in prose form; they are the kind of stories that don’t exist anywhere else but in comics and would probably not work as prose. Coverage and recognition of this type of work is lacking in the mainstream media, and, from what I understand, under-represented (or not represented at all) in anthologies like The Best American Comics. (Criticism of that anthology follows much in the same line as criticism of other books in that series, such as The Best American Short Stories or The Best American Essays — the works included tend to be of the same genre and reflect the tastes of the editors. This is just the nature of anthologies, but I think it’s the ‘THE BEST’ part of the title that gets people’s hackles up.) I think what those of us interested in this in comics hope and will try to bring about is that the literary establishment recognizes comics for the unique medium they are and not only when they conform to the genre of ‘literary fiction’ as it has been codified by the literary-intellectual complex.”

Jennifer de Guzman

***

“I stopped by my local Barnes & Noble this afternoon to see how Good As Lily was doing. This particular Barnes & Noble is a mid-sized one with 2 floors and an escalator. It’s mammoth. On my way out, I was coming down the escalator, gazing out at the endless battalions of shelves. As I was being slowly lowered into this vast ocean of books, it really hit me what a microscopic portion of this world I really was. What a pointless, insignificant drop in the bucket my little book was. Just another book among millions. Nothing special – a simple-minded diversion, at best. Am I so egotistical to believe that someone should choose my book over the hundreds and thousands of books in that store? Does my book even deserve to be read when someone could fill his or her mind, imagination, and spirit with The Catcher in the Rye or American Born Chinese or Carl Sagan’s Cosmos instead? How can I expect someone to dish out their hard-earned, minimum-wage money on the drivel that is my writing when there are so many – SO MANY – books they could read instead. It’s truly a blessing – a miracle, really! – that any of my books sell at all. It’s easy to forget that.”

–Derek Kirk Kim

***

“Rather than inventing fictional characters to express ideas in a complex manner ‘artists’ nowadays only write comics of themselves sitting a desk saying their ideas in a freakishly non-complex straightforward manner. And it’s boring as F*&k.”

–Michael Climek of the blog Foot2Mouth

***

“I love comic books and I have every Spider-Man comic book series since 1984. I listed him as my hero as he is the only superhero that had bills to pay. You can mention Batman but he was rich while Superman was from another planet. But Spider-Man had to make ends pay here on earth!”

Ultimate fighter Anderson Silva

***

“Understand this clearly: Vertigo has trained their audience to Wait For The Trade. This isn’t accidental behavior at this point, it is a learned behavior. You know you have a problem when Avatar (of all outfits!) can launch new ongoing ‘Vertigo-like’ titles at better numbers than Vertigo can!”

Retailer Brian Hibbs

***

“I’m not trying to say that Sequential Tart is the ne plus ultra of Comics Journalism, just that there are other, equally rewarding, equally vital kinds of journalism, and to tar and feather many writers as lackeys and on-hangers because what we write is is not ‘real’ journalism shows that one can’t even be bothered to look up the meaning of the word ‘journalism’ or ‘journalist’. Let me give a hint: nowhere in the Oxford English Dictionary (considered the most authoritative dictionary in the world of Academia) is the word ‘news’ used in either definition.”

Katherine Keller, Editrix-in-Chief of Sequential Tart

***

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 21st, 2007 at 1:37 pm and is filed under Quote Unquote, Version 1.0 Blog@. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.