Daily Inspiration Quote by Dave Sim

Sim frames creativity as less lightning bolt, more trespass. "I went to them" flips the romance of inspiration into something active, even willful: the artist isn’t a passive antenna but a person choosing to leave the safe, crowded room of consensus. That shift matters because it smuggles in responsibility. If ideas are places you travel to, then you can’t entirely blame them when you come back changed.

The repetition works like a drumbeat - "Ideas lead you..". - insisting that thought has momentum and consequences. Sim isn’t selling the cute myth that imagination is liberating in a wholesome way; he’s warning that original connections pull you away from "commonly held perceptions of reality", which is another way of saying: community, comfort, and the social rewards of agreeing. The subtext is that the price of insight is estrangement. You don’t just get smarter; you get weirder to other people.

"Out here" suggests an edge-of-town geography: the margins where cartoonists, obsessives, and cranks all end up together, indistinguishable at a distance. Then he lands on "darkness", not as melodrama but as an honest admission that unlit territory includes mistakes, paranoia, and discoveries you can’t immediately justify. In the context of a cartoonist - a job built on solitary labor and long-form fixation - it reads like a self-portrait of the creative process as voluntary exile. Sim’s edge is that he makes the scary part the point: art isn’t a guided tour; it’s choosing to walk past the streetlights.