Liana Finck Quotes

if you care too much, then you can't tell a story that moves. You can't be funny. If you're too close to something, sometimes you can't make it light or snappy.

I've drawn compulsively all my life. I think Instagram is the format that comes closest to my natural tendency of drawing as a means to process things that bother me in real life.

I so much think of the Torah as just a story and, like, a beautiful window into the way people thought thousands of years ago and the way people were thousands of years ago.

I love them! I was reading Miss Manners for a while (that was Judith Martin). I watch The Steve Harvey Show sometimes, and I love Judge Judy. I watch Kathy Lee and Hoda (this is only at the gym, so it’s only in the winter, when I’m running on a treadmill!). Since I wrote this book I’ve been really into talk radio and podcasts in which people have mundane conversations. I just want to hear people talking about their lives.

I think I don't write fiction because I don't really know how to invent characters. I just know how to put myself into a character. So even when I read the Torah, I can't really fathom an old man with a beard Creator. I can only fathom kind of a childish, sweet, very flawed person taking a lot of joy in making things and then feeling really angry at herself for not making something better.

Something I learned about myself is that I really like to draw tiny. For Instagram each drawing is an inch or two, so I scanned them very high-resolution and blew them up. It's a strange way to work, but I think it makes sense because I'm saying intense things in a very tiny voice, which describes my personality.

My grandma gave me the “Bintel Brief” book that she had—this collection of letters that was published in 1971—that’s when all the jadedness fell away. I was transported...The book (“Bintel Brief”) is a collection of short stories based on letters written to the Yiddish advice column “A Bintel Brief” that ran in the newspaper the Forward beginning in 1906. The letters were very intense—they were by new immigrants to the United States from Eastern Europe, and they deal with a lot of life-or-death issues—but they are also funny, weird, and sweet.

<p>NOT EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE EVERYTHING.

If you're a gentleman and you're wandering around in a garden and you're inspired and you write a haiku, that's real creativity. But if you have to make 1,000 cakes to sell, you're not going to put your soul into it. It's a matter of scale. I think great art is often the gentleman writing the haiku, but in order to be an artist you also need to be able to make 1,000 cakes in an afternoon.

I had complicated feelings about Judaism. I went to Jewish schools and synagogue and youth groups and summer camps. I’d always been an outsider as a kid. I was really shy and a little weird, maybe Asperger’s-ish, and I was really happy to get away from the suburbs when I moved to the city from New Jersey for art school. New York was a much more open-minded place, and the world of art seemed to like me for being unusual. I never rebelled against Judaism, though.

I’m surprised that people relate to my stuff. I always thought of myself as not that relatable and maybe in person I’m not that relatable, but it warms my heart that people can relate.

There have been many times in my life when I’ve chosen art over people, but like my mom, I thought it was a choice. I think that’s a very romantic notion and it’s a good notion to put in books, but it’s not a good one to live by. I think seeing people does broaden your world a lot and art will come back when it’s ready. Even if you walk away from it for a minute.

<p>I AM A PUZZLE I AM SOLVING

(On one page you wrote, “if you intend to create a world – you need to leave the real world behind”) I think my mom believed that. I think both of us deep down have this feeling that either you can have your art or you can have your life. I don’t think that’s really true. I think you can have both.

I don't know a lot of cartoonists who laugh a lot. I think when we hear a joke we just get still like a dog who smells an animal. It becomes about isolating the part that's funny and unexpected and thinking more about that. You get spiraled into the nuances of what makes something funny and who thinks it's funny.