“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.”

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.

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

Irony can elude the genius among us, sometimes.

Some of us find our lives abridged even before the paperback comes out.

It’s not terribly dignified to have anyone seeing one laugh at one’s own material.

As one woman told me, “When I decided to come in to work happy, everybody around me became happy.” This woman had decided to quit a job she hated, and on the last day of her two weeks’ notice, she woke up happy.

It took us 2,000 years to find Noah’s Ark. Do we ever find Flight 370?

…I do like the low frequencies. It’s from years and years of observing audiences when they hear a lower frequency coming from an instrument it tends to pull them in.

Religion is a completely different thing from the claim that the Earth is six thousand years old. That’s just crazy.

Understand that I’m at my best when it comes to proving a point, not only to show that I’m a better fighter and a better athlete at 40½ years old, but I’m at my best when I know I’ve got to beat the system again.

I never wanted to retire. I wanted to kind of shift my work pattern so I could stay fresh and invigorated, and use the experience that I had gained in 30 years, but in a slightly different direction.

We are so used to the notion of our own inevitability as life’s dominant species that it is hard to grasp that we are here only because of timely extraterrestrial bangs and other random flukes.

Having your goal to focus on is key, but don’t let it become more important than your excellence next year and the year after.