American Cartoonist Quotations

Nobody got where they are today by living for tomorrow.

Look, I think if you talk down to a kid or aim specifically at a kid, most kids aren't gonna like it, really, because most kids can feel when you are being patronizing.

It is a peculiar art form, but I think it's a necessary art form - and I do believe it's a noble art form.

If I ever had an out-of-body experience - I'd try to come back to a different one.

Despite what they tell you, there are simply no moral absolutes in a complex world.

Many of us are more capable than some of us... but none of us is as capable as all of us!

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.

Writing this book feels like a completely different activity from writing my comic strip because it's about real life. I feel like I'm using a part of my brain that's been dormant until now.

We start out talking about the story, trying to figure out who is who and what should happen, taking notes the whole time. Then I do a rough layout of the issue, showing what happens on each page. Then we discuss that some more.

This was more than just a cow - this was an entire career I was looking at.

But now that I'm cartooning full-time, I'm more of an observer. I'm talking to people who are experiencing these things. But it's not like being in the trenches.

Every time I started going in the direction of thinking how it might turn out, I started to just turn my brain around and not go there, because I think the surest way to guarantee that you won't win is to assume that you will.

There's no future in spending our present worrying about our past.

I think we're the first generation to successfully integrate American society.

Mondays are the potholes in the road of life.

Happiness doesn't depend on how much you have to enjoy, but how much you enjoy what you have.

I get a lot of mail from men who really identify with Stuart, you know, Sparrow's boyfriend. I love that. Even though I used to say I wanted men to read the strip even though there weren't any men in it, so they'd be forced to identify with the women.

I hope we don't get to the point where we have to have the cat stop chasing the mouse to teach him glassblowing and basket weaving.

These days an income is something you can't live without - or within.

I had such a close relationship with my dog, and my dog so filled the need in my life to have children that I just wanted Cathy to have that experience.

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

I'm definitely a centrist and feel like both parties can be absurd.

I think Dilbert is actually a radical strip.

Utility is when you have one telephone, luxury is when you have two, opulence is when you have three - and paradise is when you have none.

That's all true, but there was something else going on for me as a kid, something about my gender identity that I haven't figured out yet. And that's one of the things I'm hoping to dissect and investigate in this memoir project.

That's not the part of the story that I'm interested in, anyway. The part that I'm interested in is all the personal stuff. I tried to base the powers on family archetypes.

We are set to make very bad history.

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

Negative humor is forgotten immediately. It's the stuff that makes us feel better about our lives that lives long. Much more satisfying. Enter children's books.

Friends don't necessarily made good business or creative partners.

But mostly, it's a book about my relationship with my father.

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

My mother is, my father certainly was. They were kind of the local intelligentsia in the town where I grew up.

The comic page is dying; I didn't want to go with it.

I never thought Cathy would get married in the comic strip. And I also thought I would never get married.

The reason people blame things on previous generations is that there's only one other choice.

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.

There are few things more satisfying than seeing your children have teenagers of their own.

Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.

This was a team that truly learned the meaning of (what it is like to) be a team, and they can take that with them the rest of their lives.

When I'm writing the book I'm laughing at just how overblown the characters seemed. How full of himself he seems. But I didn't get far enough in the series to really drive the joke of it home.

When I grew up, I studied karate for years. I got pretty strong, but eventually I had to acknowledge that I really didn't like fighting at all, so I quit.

We were called The Toilets originally - we were flushed with success.

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

Love is like racing across the frozen tundra on a snowmobile which flips over, trapping you underneath. At night, the ice-weasels come.

So here we have pi squared, which an engineer would call 10.

My impression was, he's walking as though he's made of glass, and if you should touch him he would just shatter apart. I don't know if it was an act or what, but it sure was effective.

Retro looking stuff but a lot of these guys doing these shows are my age or younger. I was just disgusted. I hated being around that kind of thing. Not that it affected what I did because when it comes down to it I was doing my own show.

One of them is already having some menopausal symptoms. I'm working on that. I'm giving them all little lines under the eyes, trying to sort of make them age gracefully.

Because they feel that without them telling you to do this, you wouldn't have had the characters that you have, you wouldn't have the book that you have.

If it is your time love will track you down like a cruise missile. If you say 'No! I don't want it right now,' that's when you'll get it for sure. Love will make a way out of no way. Love is an exploding cigar which we willingly smoke.

I always liked to draw, and was actively encouraged by my mom, who had wanted to be an artist herself, but didn't get the chance.

I would say you feel a lot more pressure at a national tournament than a state tournament. This is more of a fun weekend out with the guys. The national tournament is more business.

Just to see him come on the stage was an event. They had very high risers, and back a little bit, so he'd walk around behind the risers and right across the front of the stage to the podium, remember?

It breaks my heart to see these young, really talented bands getting chewed up into the system. I remember a time if you'd signed to a major label it was such a sell out! But now... unless you've signed to a big label, you're a failure now.

I think Maus I is better than Maus II. The standard here is whether or not it's as good as a great book of prose literature and by that standard, no, it's not that great.

Johnny was the very first book I did.

That's the problem today: Who is the creator?

I was married, my wife was pregnant, and I just wanted to get out of the laboring bit and try to become an artist. I liked that all my life.

You keep pitching. Most of the pitches run wild. A few are caught.

Yeah, I think some of that is just wish-fulfillment, you know, how little kids fantasize through their drawings. I wanted to be powerful.

Usually when I get a letter from a parent it's because they buy my stuff. I don't really get a whole lot of negative response in general.

When Irving got Vivian it was at a point when CATHY was thoroughly disgusted with him and then suddenly saw this other side of him.

When I found this opportunity to answer the ad, I got the job and I've been there ever since.

We believe in personal choice, rather than society dictating how we must live our lives.

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.

I used to wake up every day and think of some way he'd slighted me. Now that I've sent this thing out into the world I hardly ever think about my Dad.

Ted Turner sailed into the meeting, and I mean sailed. He holds himself as if he were at the helm of his sailboat, in the process of winning the race.

After about twenty issues of Josie, they decided to pay me.

Some robot who never made me laugh didn't think was funny or didn't think the audience would understand. I guess that's television.

Archie was in the fold of all the other publishers that I was working for, and I was probably averaging one story a week from them.

And the idea that a story is true, that it actually happened, is endlessly compelling, I think, not just to me but to people in general.

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.

A lot of people believe that if everybody just did what they were told - obeyed - everything would be fine. But that's not what life is all about. That's not real. It's never going to happen.

Abstract art is a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

It's not like I'm taking 20 grand from the shows. I mean there's no record label, so this is a genuine thing. And I think most people can see that. I think that anyone who knows me, knows I do things with integrity.

It's funny, because politically Spiegelman and I don't come from that different a place, but I view his approach as being intellectually dishonest.

Then is when I decided to take it to Archie to see if they could do it as a comic book. I showed it to Richard Goldwater, and he showed it to his father, and a day or two later I got the OK to do it as a comic book.

It's sort of what the Johnny and Devi stories are about, the idea of always being a slave to something.

The best thing to do is just leave them alone. Alligators want to be away from you just as much as you want to be away from them.

It's definitely part of it, that the men were having fun and doing the interesting things but also, I don't know, I'm just thinking more about gender and how maybe in some way I am more of a boy than a girl.

I love the show and a lot of what came out of it, like some of the people I met and got to work with, but those were truly some of the unhappiest days of my life.

I mean, I'll have an idea about what a panel will look like as I'm writing, but I often don't touch a pencil until the text is completely finished.

In the concerts I not only played my own songs, but played songs by Dave Sharp. That's my way of keeping the true spirit of the Alarm alive.

I hope that I can get people to read it without having to change it. Especially now that the strip has more different kinds of characters. It's really not all lesbians any more.

I probably read Harriet the Spy about 70,000 times.

I brought samples in, because I didn't have any comic book samples, and I brought all these illustrations that I had influenced by Norman Rockwell and a couple of the other big boys. That's all I had, that's all I brought.

I designed all the characters, anyway, and Frank Doyle was doing all the writing. I didn't have any more input on what direction they were going to go with Josie.

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

And I've met all kinds of people, oh, God, presidents and everybody else, and, I'm not too impressed with celebrity, with names now.

And I, uh, I wonder how anybody can think his personality changes with his success. I've had quite a bit of success but I feel that I'm just the same person as I always was.

You can dream, create, design and build the most wonderful place in the world, but it requires people to make the dream a reality.

You may not realize it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you.

Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

I never called my work an 'art' It's part of show business, the business of building entertainment.