Motherhood Quote by Chris Ware

It is a cartoonist's version of stage fright, delivered with the deadpan precision Chris Ware is famous for. The line pretends to be modesty, but it's really a coping strategy: shrink the audience until the work feels survivable. By imagining only his wife, a few friends, and "occasionally my mom" as readers, Ware builds a private room inside a public career, a mental firewall against the noise of reception, criticism, and the internet's hungry need to turn art into content.

The phrasing does quiet work. "Prefer to imagine" signals an active, almost daily choice, like a ritual of self-protection. The list is carefully calibrated: spouse (intimacy), friends (peer approval), mother (childhood judgment). That "occasionally" is the tell. It's funny, but it also hints at the particular terror of maternal readership: the person who knows your earliest drafts as a human being, not an artist. Ware's comics, from Jimmy Corrigan to Building Stories, are obsessed with shame, small humiliations, the ache of being perceived and misperceived. This quote echoes that theme off the page.

Then comes the twist: "though I realize that this is somewhat unrealistic". It's an understatement that smuggles in the real point. Of course it's unrealistic; Ware is canonical. The joke is that fame doesn't cancel vulnerability. If anything, it amplifies it. The intent isn't to deny his audience but to keep the act of making from being swallowed by it, preserving the fragile conditions under which honest, meticulous work can still happen.