Bill Griffith Quotations

Everybody that loves Nancy loves it in a slightly condescending way. Nancy is comics reduced to their most elemental level.

Unfortunately what came out of it was also kind of an imitation community with a lot of mindless conformity.

But now with technology I could sit down and do a bunch of character drawings and scan them into a computer, and the computer using my exact style could bring it into life, where it would have been edited by various human beings before.

A full, rich drawing style is a drawback.

Jazz, rock and roll, movies and comics are the culture of America.

Comics is a language. It's a language most people understand intuitively.

Everyone says how Calvin and Hobbes is about a real kid, to me there's nothing real about it; it's an adult using a kid's body as a mouthpiece.

I guess if you take yourself seriously as an artist there starts either the problem or the beauty of doing good artwork.

I hate Calvin and Hobbes. I think its a big re-hash of formula kid strips.

I just became one with my browser software.

I think Zippy is part of me, but I'm not Zippy.

If something is going on in my life, it winds up getting into my strip.

Looking back Little Lulu was an early feminist, but at the time I just thought she was a really feisty developed comic strip character.

The down side of Americans being obsessed with pop culture is that they kind of like it light.

When I was an art student in the early 60′s before the acid scene began I was smoking pot just like anyone else who was an artist.

Zippy accepts chaos as what it is, which is the real order of everything.

I always thought of Levittown as a joke.

I had a mixture, my father was a career army man and my mother was a writer.

Mike Judge, who I've become friends with over the years never took himself seriously as an artist.

Well, I've done a lot of strips since I've been here about Zippy and me being in Connecticut.

Yes, but personally I was never a big acid head.

I had a very diametrically opposite set of parents.

Their scrambled attention spans struck me as a metaphor for the way we get our doses of reality these days.

Then I abandoned comics for fine art because I had some romantic vision of being like Vincent Van Gogh Jr.

She encouraged any artistic impulse I had, and my father discouraged any artistic impulse I had. They took out their problems with each other on me and my sister.

I went to an art school in Brooklyn and painted Fine Art, if that's what you'd call it for eight years in New York, until I saw the first underground comics in the East Village Other.

What I do is draw but if you make an animated feature obviously it takes a whole team of people, and Zippy is my work. I felt that turning it over to a team of people would be wrong.

We're going to throw the football. We're hoping our team speed helps us get past those 300-pounders.

We're going to throw the football, ... We're hoping our team speed helps us get past those 300-pounders.

What we're seeing out of this area recruiting-wise are Division II kids, ... We don't have the biggest kids here.

Going too far is half the pleasure of not getting anywhere.

I went to an art school in Brooklyn and painted Fine Art, if thats what youd call it for eight years in New York, until I saw the first underground comics in the East Village Other.

Vegetarianism can easily reach religious proportions. Refraining from meat on moral grounds serves to dignify feelings of guilt toward sad-eyed, furry creatures and substitutes righteousness for squeamishness.

All life is a blur of Republicans and meat.

My first character was Mr. Toad.

Frivolity is a stern taskmaster.

When the Zippy movie first started being talked about very rarely would people actually say animation to me, because I would never consider it.

MTV won't do anything unless they own it 100% so that didn't tempt me at all because I would never give away the character.

I grew up on Long Island, and my wife and I had always talked about coming back East some day and living in the country.

His observations are almost an obsession. He's very neurotic, full of self-doubt, which he masquerades as being critical of everything.

I went through nine drafts of a screenplay; it had a whole plot, not just vignettes. Right now I'm getting a lot of feelers from animation companies.

The phrase is supposed to be satirical, but lots of people don't see the subtext.

Before I started doing Zippy I had an early encounter with a Pinhead in 1969.

Every coach here expects to win. We're trying to instill that in these kids.

At this point it's kind of a faded, tattered dream, but over the years there was some serious effort and a lot of serious money spent to make a movie.

At this point, it's just kind of a long tradition to help with this auction and help Adele out. I've been there as long as its been going. It was a fast 20 years. I would do anything she asked me to do.

Sometimes when people read Zippy they're expecting it to fall into the same formula as some other comics. That's not what I do.

Adele is one of the most, to coin a cliche, life-affirming people I've ever met, especially because of her bleak outlook,

Zippy is living in the moment. He's at peace with himself because he's out of step with everyone; he doesn't know it, and he doesn't care.

Zippy has no problem with the irrationality of the universe, whereas most of us are desperately trying to make order out of the universe, and our lives.

I've known Crumb for twenty-five years and no movie could affect my opinion of him.

I'm trying to shine a light on things that are recognizable in all of us, that Zippy embodies, that once we admit to, maybe we can laugh at.

In making my strips the inspiration is really only the germ of something, they say it's 99% perspiration, 1% inspiration.

In any comics, any animation, the artwork should be as important as anything else.

I remember seeing one stuck to the window of a KFC. What could be more rewarding than to see your work assaulting the target of your satire?

He's starting to learn defenses and starting to learn how to read defenses. He's more confident standing in the pocket and taking his time making a decision.

Cartooning has come a long way. It started out as an adult medium, for satirical purposes; then the appeal to children got emphasized.