Daily Inspiration Quote by Bill Griffith

There is a sly trapdoor in Bill Griffith's "I guess": the shrug of a working cartoonist who knows that artistic identity can be both oxygen and poison. The line pivots on a blunt premise - taking yourself seriously - and then refuses to moralize about it. Seriousness is framed not as virtue but as a switch that turns on consequences. The "problem or the beauty" isn’t a tidy dualism; it’s a warning that the same self-regard that sharpens your craft can also corrode it.

Griffith is coming from a medium that’s spent decades fighting to be treated as legitimate art while simultaneously thriving on irreverence. Underground and alternative comics built their credibility by mocking the very institutions that confer credibility. So when a cartoonist talks about "doing good artwork", he’s also talking about the anxiety of legitimacy: the moment you internalize the museum gaze, the grant-panel gaze, the legacy gaze. You start editing yourself for an imagined seriousness.

The phrasing matters. "Starts" suggests a threshold you cross, not a constant state. "Either" suggests you don’t get to opt out of the tension; you just choose how it plays out. Read one way, seriousness is the engine: discipline, ambition, the willingness to revise instead of riff. Read another, it’s the saboteur: solemnity, overthinking, the death of the mischievous impulse that makes comics bite. Griffith’s intent feels less like advice than a diagnosis: great work often arrives bundled with the very neuroses that make it hard to make.