# Art Spiegelman

Art Spiegelman (born February 15, 1948) is an American comics artist, editor, and advocate for the medium of comics, best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning comic memoir, Maus.

## Quotes

* What Franz Kafka was to the first half of the 20th century, Philip K. Dick is to the second half.
** As quoted in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick : Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings (1995) edited by Lawrence Sutin, p. x.
* A manifesto, a diary, a crumpled suicide note, and a still relevant love letter.
** On his work Breakdowns : A Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@?*! (1978; 2008) as quoted in "Art Spiegelman on ‘Breakdowns’ Redux and the Dark Side of Tina Fey" by Rebecca Milzoff in New York magazine (8 October 2008).
* 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.
** As quoted in "Art Spiegelman on ‘Breakdowns’ Redux and the Dark Side of Tina Fey" by Rebecca Milzoff in New York magazine (8 October 2008).
* 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.
** On his book Jack and the Box, as quoted in "Smart Art : Spiegelman doesn’t dumb down for kids" by Alexandra Zissu in New York Magazine (16 November 2008).
* I became a philosophy major literally to understand why I should put up with this shit.
** After taking all the difficult art classes, Spiegelman was required to take the easy ones to obtain an arts major. He discusses here switching instead to a philosophy major; as quoted in "Breakfast with the FT: Art Spiegelman 'Drawn from Memory'" in Financial Times (29 November 2008).
* 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.
** As quoted in "Breakfast with the FT: Art Spiegelman 'Drawn from Memory'" in Financial Times (29 November 2008).
* Comics seem to be cooking these days. It's like being a rock star.
** As quoted in "Breakfast with the FT: Art Spiegelman 'Drawn from Memory'" in Financial Times (29 November 2008).
* 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.
** On his book Maus, in an interview with Democracy Now! (2 February 2022)

## Quotes about Art Spiegelman

* 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.
** Matthew Baigell Jewish-American Artists and the Holocaust (1997)

## External links

* Interview with New York Times Magazine