Alejandro Jodorowsky on Making Art

I am not making art to give fun to people — I am not a clown, I am not a businessman making money. I am a human being. I am making art to heal myself; that is what I am doing and when I will heal myself, then I will start to heal others.

—Alejandro Jodorowsky, (An Eagle Fighting with Flies: An Interview with Alejandro Jodorowsky)

You know, in order to do something, you need to organize your time. It is very easy to do — you organize your time. You say, “One hour a day you will write. From this hour to this hour, I will write that. And even if I don’t have idea, one hour I write. Even a line. Even three words. But I write. Every day I write.” You organize your time and then you do whatever you want. You take your time like your friend and you don’t lose your friend. Because your time is your life and then you organize your life. I do that, everyday I do that.

—Alejandro Jodorowsky, (An Eagle Fighting with Flies: An Interview with Alejandro Jodorowsky)

In The Incal, or in another of my comics, The Metabarons, I placed an impossible solution at the end of each chapter and then I waited. What is the solution to this problem? I didn’t know it myself. For example, in The Metabarons, the powerful warrior Othon needs to have children, but he lost his testicles in a fight with a bull. And he will have children because the oracle said he will have a son. How will he have a son?

But I found a way to do it, no? A woman comes who is a magician, and with a drop of his blood she makes sperm and he has a child. And in The Incal, I have impossible situations all the time.

—Alejandro Jodorowsky, (The Most Beautiful Illusion)

My writing routine is everyday I put a record on, the same one since 20 years. Then I burn a stick of incense, I put perfume here on the insides of my soles, I paint my left testicle red, and I write.

—Alejandro Jodorowsky