Daily Inspiration Quote by Joe Sacco

There is a sly professionalism in that little “I think,” a hedge that reads less like modesty than method. Joe Sacco isn’t selling the myth of the heroic reporter who barges into a war zone and extracts Truth; he’s pointing to the quieter skill that makes his work possible: letting other people’s realities take up space. In a field that rewards the sharp question and the punchy takeaway, “generally a good listener” is almost a contrarian credential.

The subtext is control through restraint. Sacco’s comics journalism depends on testimony, memory, and the messy texture of lived experience. Listening becomes an ethical posture: you don’t just record what someone says, you sit with what they’re willing to reveal, what they avoid, and what the surrounding circumstances have trained them to fear. “Anyway” is doing extra work here, too. It implies this isn’t a performance he turns on for interviews; it’s a baseline temperament, a personality trait pressed into service. That matters because his subjects are often people who have every reason to distrust outsiders with notebooks, cameras, or agendas.

Contextually, Sacco’s reporting has always wrestled with the power imbalance between narrator and narrated. A journalist can “listen” as a way to launder authority: I heard it, therefore I own it. Sacco’s best pages complicate that by showing the interviewer in the frame, implicated, sometimes overwhelmed, sometimes unsure. The line signals a self-awareness that’s easy to miss: listening isn’t innocence. It’s labor, it’s strategy, and in Sacco’s hands, it’s a refusal to turn other people into raw material for a clean moral.