Top 122 Quotes & Sayings by Gene Luen Yang - Page 2

Both my mother and my father grew up in Asia, in a time of political instability. They'd earned college degrees before setting foot in the States but had to work menial jobs early on in order to make ends meet.

When I first started making comics, I was living with a bunch of guys, old college friends. We had this deal. At the end of each day, they would ask me how far I'd gotten on my comic. And if I hadn't made my goals, they were supposed to make me feel really bad about myself. They happily obliged.

There's bleeding between age groups in terms of reading material, and there's bleeding between media. So there are books that are clearly comics and books that are prose, and then there are these books that are kind of in-between.

Carl Barks and Don Rosa are two of my favorite cartoonists ever.

'The Green Turtle' was created in the 1940s by a cartoonist named Chu Hing, one of the first Asian Americans to work in the American comic book industry.

It's a big deal to reveal your friend's deepest truth, your friend's deepest secret. And for all of us, when we do these big things, there's a complexity of motivation that comes behind that decision.

I grew up on monthly comics. My closet is full of monthly comics. I've always wanted to do a monthly comic, and while I've had a couple of offers, the timing has never worked out. Most superhero comics come into the world as monthly series, so we wanted the same for 'The Shadow Hero.'

For 'American Born Chinese,' my first graphic novel with First Second Books, I did mostly 'memory' research. It's fiction, but I pulled heavily from my own childhood.

I would hope that maybe math teachers could use 'Prime Baby' as a way of establishing an emotional connection between students and numbers.

Superheroes were created in America, they're most popular in America, and at their best, they embody American ideals.

Eventually, I just couldn't imagine myself being in a cubicle for my entire career.

Going from idea to production is a huge hurdle. It took me a while to overcome it. It's basically all about self discipline, right?

My experience of Chinese culture is indirect, through echoes. When I approach the cashier at my local Chinese supermarket, they switch to English before I've even said a word. They somehow know that I'm not quite Chinese enough.

The project that I did between 'Boxer & Saints' was 'The Shadow Hero,' which is illustrated by Sonny Liew, an artist who lives in Singapore.

I noticed that when my daughter was born, my son really, really liked her. But then as she started getting older, and as she started crawling around our house and touching different things that were his, sibling rivalry issues started appearing.

Figuring out a way to balance the Boxer story with the Chinese Christians was difficult.

There's something about the intimacy of comics that gives you a false bravado; you don't always consider the consequences.

Superman is such an old character. He's an old character with this huge legacy behind him. And one of the awesome things about the fact that he's been around for these decades is that he's gone through these different phases.

Dichotomies are an inherent part of comics, aren't they? Comics are both pictures and words. They blend time and space. Many feature characters with dual identities like Bruce Wayne/Batman. Cartoonists also tend to live dichotomous lives because many of us have day jobs.

I took a Logo programming class in fifth grade. Logo is a language specifically designed for the classroom environment. It was basically doodling through words.

The most labor-intensive part of putting together a comic is the drawing.

At any comic book convention in America, you'll find aspiring cartoonists with dozens of complex plot ideas and armloads of character sketches. Only a small percentage ever move from those ideas and sketches to a finished book.

In academia in general, there's this push toward using comics as an educational tool.

I was really worried that sitting at home by myself in front of a computer was going to make me crazy.

My brain subconsciously limits itself to panel compositions that my hand can actually draw.

As I was researching, I was struck by how similar the Boxers were to Joan of Arc. Joan was basically a French Boxer. She was a poor teenager who wanted to do something about the foreign aggressors invading her homeland.

Superman was created in the late 1930s, and humankind's idea of what the future would be was very different.

I think the 'Boxers' book was easier for me to envision as a comic, because they were on this epic journey. These teenagers basically gathered into this army and marched to the capital city where they had a showdown with the Europeans and Japanese. On the 'Saints' side, it was a lot trickier.

'Avatar: The Last Airbender' is, to my mind, the greatest American animated series ever produced. The characters lived and breathed.

I have a fairly limited drawing style. I'm not like my friend Derek Kirk Kim, who can pretty much change his style at will. My drawing style can handle some of my stories, but not all of them.

When you work with somebody else, you automatically get a mixed voice. You hope it will benefit the story. But you don't know what the result will be.

I think there is always romantic tension between Lois Lane and Clark Kent.

I grew up in a religious community, and like everyone, I went through a period of doubt and later made a conscious choice to embrace the faith of my childhood.

When you work on a pre-existing character, when you end up getting invited to be part of a legacy character like Superman, I don't feel like it would be true to the character if all I did was go in looking to express my own voice.

'Avatar: The Last Airbender' creators Mike DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko have, along with their team, painstakingly planned out the Avatarverse.

When I work on my own stuff - and I think this is true for anybody - but when you work on something that you just completely own, you are trying to stay as true to your own storytelling voice as you can.

Writing for myself and writing for another artist are two very different experiences. When I handle both the story and the art, I have full control. I can endlessly tweak every word and every line.

I never worked a job that required research. I'm not really good at it, to be honest.

With my own comics, I try hard to get the vision in my head onto paper, to have one match the other as closely as possible. With the 'Airbender' comics, I'm working with someone else's vision, an already-established vision. I want to stay true to what's come before.

I grew up with an Apple 2E - I had a deep, emotional attachment to that machine - and I loved doodling.

Nobody really knows for sure how the Boxer Rebellion started. It began among the poor, and the history of the poor is rarely written down.

Sometimes, a fight you cannot win is still worth fighting.

As somebody who's kind of a technophile, I'm interested in how traditional and digital publishing connect. Maybe ten years ago they were seen as antagonists, but now they complement each other. There's data that shows digital sales actually drive print sales. And even the ways in which pictures and words, text and image, interact - we're seeing these books that are very hard to categorize. All of that is very exciting to me.

Coming from the world of comics, I was very surprised that writers and illustrators, for the most part, don't talk, and they don't collaborate.

I was always a slow reader, from the very beginning. I remember in first grade our teacher divided us into groups, and I was definitely in the slow group. She didn't call it that, but everybody in the class knew. But I still loved reading. Being a slow reader affected my grades in school, but it didn't affect my love for reading. I still loved going to the library, and I still loved reading books.

I think reading has got so many more enemies now that graphic novels have kind of flipped over to that side.

What is China but a people and their stories?

Superheroes are also about immigrants. Superman, the prototype of all superheroes, is a prototypical immigrant. His homeland was in crisis, so his parents sent him to America in search of a better life. He has two names, one American, Clark Kent, and the other foreign, Kal-El. He wears two sets of clothes and lives in between two cultures. He loves his new country, but a part of him still longs for his old one.

At the very core of what a comic is, time and space are kind of the same thing. When your reader moves her eyes across the page, she should be moving through time in your story.

I think a lot of us go through a period where we feel like outsiders, and deal with that by wishing we were insiders. So that was the emotional core of American Born Chinese.

Building a habit of reading leads to all sorts of reading.

One of the ways [racism] pops up is when they turn a comic into a live-action movie and there's this temptation to make Asian characters white.

Zombies aren't about zombies. It's not about the dead bodies. I think it's a very hopeful subgenre. It says that regardless of what happens, humanity will get through it. We'll figure out a way to survive.

My best teachers, the teachers who had the deepest effect on my reading, combined the two. They would mix required reading with reading where you had some choice, you had some autonomy. There's a place for both. A good teacher will know how to find that balance.

In the '40s and '50s, a lot of teachers and librarians saw the graphic novel as the enemy of reading.

To find your true identity within the will of Tze Yo Tzuh...that is the highest of all freedoms.

It's easy to become anything you wish . . . so long as you're willing to forfeit your soul.

If you look at our world, we're becoming so much more diverse in every sense of the word. It's not just about culture or identity. It's also about the different ways we communicate.

Wait." "So what am I supposed to do now?" "You know, Jin, I would have saved myself from five hundred years' imprisonment beneath a mountain of rock had I only realized how good it is to be a monkey." (222-223)

I think a lot of us who are in books now were nervous children.