Creativity Quote by Jaime Hernandez

Jaime Hernandez is describing craft as a kind of disciplined procrastination, but without the guilt. “I leave a lot open” sounds casual, almost evasive, until you hear the practical intelligence underneath it: he’s talking about building a story world with intentional negative space, trusting that meaning can be earned later rather than forced early. For an artist best known for long-running, character-driven comics, that’s not laziness. It’s architecture.

The repetition - “fill it in later” twice, bluntly - works like a shrug that’s also a manifesto. Hernandez is rejecting the fantasy of total control, the idea that good art arrives fully formed. Instead he’s defending the serial creator’s advantage: time. In comics, especially in ongoing work, the page is both a present moment and a promise. Leaving threads loose isn’t just convenient; it lets real life, changing interests, and deepening empathy seep into the work. Characters can age into themselves. Motives can get complicated. A throwaway detail can mature into backstory, not because it was preordained, but because the artist stayed open enough to recognize its future usefulness.

There’s also a quiet refusal of “content machine” pressure here. The subtext is permission: you don’t need a perfect answer on day one to begin. Start with what you can draw, what you can stage, what you can make feel true - then let the blanks become invitations instead of failures. Hernandez frames uncertainty as a tool, and that’s a deeply liberating stance in any medium built on iteration.