“I can say that even in the midst of my most cynical comic stripping: Opus shone through with a bit of heart, anchoring the ugly proceedings with a comforting pull of emotion.”

Doonesbury had the requisite and overwhelming influence in 1980, as it did on any college cartoonist who was paying attention, of course.

I started as a news photographer at the University Of Texas’ Daily Texan.

A mind is a terrible thing. All this evolution nonsense is making me feel like a complete APE!

I don’t get fan mail. It disappeared with the digital revolution.

I was never asked to join the Editorial Cartoonists Of America. No fraternity would have me in college, either. I think they know something.

I grew up in Los Angeles and always wished I’d spent a childhood in a far different place.

I’d be a Libertarian, if they weren’t all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners.

It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.

Harry Potter’ shouldn’t be children’s first experience with suspense and plot turns.

Steve Dallas…a frat-boy lawyer who I knew in school. He’s never written me. I suspect he was shot by an annoyed girlfriend, which has saved me many legal fees.

I’ll confess right here that I secretly wish I’d have drawn a strip about a little boy with a fake tiger, going for adventures throughout the universe in spaceships of his imagination.

I drew the last image ever of Opus at midnight while Puccini was playing and I got rather stupid. Thirty years. A bit like saying goodbye to a child – which is ironic because I was never, never sentimental about him as many of his fans were.

The fan letters were mostly answered by professional people that’d done them for a living. And I didn’t have any daily connection with their response to my work. I didn’t have a relationship with my audience. And every artist should have it.

I happen to think nearly everybody – especially those one might find in the odd issue of ‘People’ magazine, including me – is frightfully boring, especially me. And Tom Cruise. Tom and I are alike in only this way.

I could draw Bloom County with my nose and pay my cleaning lady to write it, and I’d bet I wouldn’t lose 10% of my papers over the next twenty years. Such is the nature of comic-strips. Once established, their half-life is usually more than nuclear waste.

It was a huge challenge to learn digital painting well enough so that computers don’t pop into mind when one sees one.

Beer is a gift from the goddesses, a soothing balm given our species to bring joy and comfort in compensation for the curse of self-awareness.

You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition.

That’s a big part of my life – doing things that I’m not prepared to do.

I always try to put myself out of my comfort zone and out of my depth, and hopefully somewhere along the line I’ll catch up.

Light is good company, when alone; I took my comfort where I found it, and the warmest yellow bulb in the living-room lamp had become a kind of radiant babysitter all its own.

I’m pretty grounded in a lifestyle which disciplines me and gives me a sense of familiarity and comfort.

It is better to speak the truth that hurts and then heals, than falsehood that comforts and then kills.

If you make your decisions based on comfort, before long you will be uncomfortable.