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.
BERKELEY BREATHEDI 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.
More Berkeley Breathed Quotes
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Doonesbury had the requisite and overwhelming influence in 1980, as it did on any college cartoonist who was paying attention, of course.
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I paint digitally now. A pity, in some ways, as the biggest price one pays is that you no longer have a finished piece of physical art to hang on a wall. I miss that terribly.
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That’s the conundrum of cartoon stripping, as opposed to political cartoons. When your anger is the driving force of your drawing hand, failure follows. The anger is OK, but it has to serve the interests of the heart, frankly.
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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.
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My kids hear me behind my door, giggling like an idiot, and they roll their eyes at the blatant indignity of it all.
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I will go to my grave in a state of abject endless fascination that we all have the capacity to become emotionally involved with a personality that doesn’t exist.
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I grew up in Los Angeles and always wished I’d spent a childhood in a far different place.
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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.
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He comic page is dying; I didn’t want to go with it.
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It’s not terribly dignified to have anyone seeing one laugh at one’s own material.
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It was a huge challenge to learn digital painting well enough so that computers don’t pop into mind when one sees one.
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Irony can elude the genius among us, sometimes.
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A mind is a terrible thing. All this evolution nonsense is making me feel like a complete APE!
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The digital world has allowed me a connection with my reader that I’d never had before. I didn’t meet the people who read my material.
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Cartooning is about deconstruction: you gotta tear something down to make a joke.
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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.
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Dear Lord, I’ve been asked, nay commanded, to thank Thee for the Christmas turkey before us…
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And just as it is with all proper grannies, she ordered me into my pink bunny jammies.
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The universe throws us some obvious little pitches sometimes, and we need to be awake enough not to let them slip by.
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Keep in mind that in 1985, I had a potential readership of over 50 million Americans. At that time, a good portion of those were under 30.
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The cartooning was always just an abstraction. It was an income. It was making me famous. It was allowing me to go and do other things that I’d wanted to do.
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I knew ‘Mars Needs Moms! ‘ would be a movie seconds after the title came to mind. Similarly, I also knew that my daughter would be calling me a dork as a default term of endearment eventually.
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I started as a news photographer at the University Of Texas’ Daily Texan.
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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.
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I’d be a Libertarian, if they weren’t all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners.
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I ignore Hallmark Holidays. And this comes from a guy who has sold a million Opus greeting cards.
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