Liana Finck Quotes

<p>NOT EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE EVERYTHING.

The shadow represents my strangeness and my creativity—my soul, which I used to run from in hopes of learning how to fit in.

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.

(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'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.

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.

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.

I think of myself as very consciously following in the footsteps of Roz (Chast) and Liza (Donnelly) and more recently Carolita Johnson and Emily Flake. I do think of myself as a woman cartoonist in a historically men’s world. But very nice men.

I think a movement of women coming forward and saying we’re not what society says we are should also be a men’s movement. I wish men would be evaluating themselves. I see a lot of defensiveness in the bad men and a lot of ‘I’m not going to talk about myself, let’s only talk about women’ in the good men and that’s kind of a shame.

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.

I realize I don’t like to draw any character and then I realized you don’t need to make them look like anything. They just need facial expressions. That’s how it feels to be a person. You don’t know what you look like, you just know what you’re feeling.

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.

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.

I’m not interested in details. I’m interested in the power structure and some strong feelings tend to be pretty universal.

It’s a story about these quiet stories women pass on from generation to generation. It’s a thing women do because we aren’t historically the writers or the artists, so our stories are more personal and quieter...At least in my mom’s generation and earlier women were pushed by society to channel everything in their being into being a good mom and a good wife and making a smaller world for their family.