Daily Inspiration Quote by Chester Brown

Chester Brown is talking about storytelling the way working cartoonists actually experience it: not as a quest for “plot,” but as a gamble on life being legible on the page. “You kind of hope” is doing more work than it seems. It signals humility, even resignation. Brown isn’t promising drama; he’s admitting that a lot of what happens to a person is repetitive, awkward, or emotionally true but structurally messy. The artist can shape, compress, and juxtapose, but there’s a limit to how much you can alchemize ordinary events without betraying them.

The quiet punch of the line is his faith in “the events themselves.” That’s an almost anti-Hollywood stance, and it fits Brown’s broader reputation in alternative comics: a commitment to clear lines, clear choices, and an unflashy honesty that resists the usual narrative sugar. He’s pointing to a particular anxiety of autobiographical and documentary cartooning (territory Brown has famously worked in): when you’re drawing real life, you don’t get to outsource tension to villains or twists. Your material is whatever happened, plus whatever meaning you can responsibly extract from it.

“On a broad level it’s an interesting story” is the survival strategy. If the scene-by-scene beats don’t sparkle, the arc has to. Brown is naming the reader’s bargain, too: stick with the small moments because you trust they’re accumulating into something coherent. It’s a credo for comics as much as for memoir - that sequence, selection, and pacing can reveal interest that wasn’t obvious while you were living it.