David Rees Quotes

Just because something makes you smile or laugh ... doesn't mean it's a joke.

I don't even drink Coke. It tastes like robot sweat.

Once you use a toothbrush to clean a pencil sharpener, you should no longer use it to clean your teeth.

I like to do things that are new, where I feel the sense of discovery.

I wanted to get paid to sharpen pencils originally just because I thought it would be fun.

I felt really conflicted about making money off stuff that's creatively satisfying.

To me, if you're lucky enough to make stuff that people will pay money for, do a good job. Really do a good job. Especially if you're talking about real stuff, like terror atrocities and human rights abuses and pencil-sharpening techniques.

The thing I hear about a lot is when people over-sharpen their pencil with a single-blade pocket-sharpener and then when they put the pencil to the page, their tip breaks and pencil points always break irregularly. It always gets all jagged and you have to refresh the point. That's a common complaint.

The way you make money is to do something you don't like to do. And that's how you know you're a virtuous person.

Everyone has pencils in their house, no matter how hip and contemporary they are.

It would be amazing to tell my grandchildren, like, 'Yeah, I was paid to sharpen 1,000 pencils.'

The things I'm grateful for are: I had the one thing that I feel really lucky about, which is that I made something, I made art, that truly - in a weird way - truly comforted me and comforted a lot of people. And I'm really grateful that I got to have that experience.

The type of pop culture that is honestly very moving and powerful to me is [when artists] do their homework. They make it real.

I hardly ever use pencils. I'm left-handed and it's really messy if you're left-handed because of the graphite smudging. I use them more now than I used to because there's, like, 15,000 pencils all over my house.

I talked to people in the pencil industry and I talked to people as I was sharpening their pencils about the frustrations they have with pencils, so I really did do my research and I do know more about pencils than most people.

I take pop culture really seriously, I think it's really important, and the stuff that I make...I don't want it to be insubstantial, even if it's about something wacky, like sharpening pencils. I feel like I owe it to myself and I owe it to people who are really interested in pencils and I owe it to anybody to do my due diligence and give them something real.

I liked sharpening pencils and I was like, "Oh, I wonder if I could get paid to do it." And I figured it out and I did it.

I was just worried that someone was gonna think that I had been commissioned by Jamba Juice to make cartoons about Jamba Juice. And the big thing for me was - if I'm not getting paid to sell out, I don't want people to think that I'm selling out.

I didn't dare to dream of making money. But now of course, I've made many thousands of dollars sharpening pencils.

The time that I would spend revisiting my old Get Your War On strips is more profitably spent Googling myself and reading comments about how people hate my pencil-sharpening business.

I've been really surprised about a lot of the negative comments about artisanal pencil sharpening. Like, it really rubs some people the wrong way.

People think, "Wow, people in America have so much money, they're sending hundreds of pencils to this guy." I don't think those people realize that most people who are buying these pencils are buying them as art objects or conversation pieces.

I'd always been really intimidated by prose writing.

I started sharpening pencils at the census and how that was a difficult time in my life because my marriage was ending and I had quit cartooning and I didn't know what to do with myself.

I assumed that the pencil market was collapsing, but then it turns out that from 2010 to 2011 in the United States, pencil consumption went up by over six percent. I mean, those are all foreign-made pencils. Those are probably Chinese pencils, mostly, and Mexican pencils. I mean, it is an archaic communication technology, but it is still ubiquitous.