Art Spiegelman

"What Franz Kafka was to the first half of the 20th century, Philip K. Dick is to the second half."

"A manifesto, a diary, a crumpled suicide note, and a still relevant love letter."

"There's a therapeutic aspect to all making, but the nature of working is to compress, condense, and shape stuff, not to just expunge it. It's not just an exorcism."

"I guess I don’t subscribe to the twee school. I remember trying to lose our copy of Thomas the Tank Engine before I had to read it again. Life is a more dimensional and interesting affair than vestigially Victorian notions of childhood. I was trying to make something substantial, something to be read and reread."

"I became a philosophy major literally to understand why I should put up with this shit."

"I was asking the school shrink, 'Has anyone ever told you the top of your head looks like a penis?' I thought that was a really funny thing to tell a bald shrink."

"Comics seem to be cooking these days. It's like being a rock star."

"I never intended it to be for young adults, children, whatever. But over the years I’ve had to change my opinion. When I first got an award from the New York Public Library for best young adult book, I was annoyed, because I thought, “Thirteen years to make a book for adults, and here it is getting a young adult award.” And I’ve had to modify my position over the years because I’ve now met many, many children who have studied it in school, who found it on their own, who were given it by their parents, and it actually is received with a degree of real wisdom in their reading, based on the people I’ve talked to, the young people. So, I give up. Comics are for whoever can understand them."

"I didn't make Maus to teach anyone anything. I wasn't making "Auschwitz for Beginners." And I do not want Maus to ever be used as a recruiting poster for the Israeli army!"

"In his two "comic novels for adults" (not novels in comic book form), Maus and Maus II, he insisted on involving himself with small things, actualities, and remembered events, rather than reach for grand political statements. To present his parents' story and their history accurately and effectively, "it soon became clear that I had to engage myself with the specifically Jewish aspects of my parents' situation. Any universalizing could only be achieved through particulars." It might well be that in the end the most personal is the most gripping, the individual rather than the ideological, the idiosyncratic rather than the general, the specific situation rather than the imposed set of concepts. The popularity of Spiegelman's books does not reside in their curious format but in the thoroughness of the specific story they tell-that of his parents' survival."