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.
BERKELEY BREATHEDThe 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.
More Berkeley Breathed Quotes
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I was never asked to join the Editorial Cartoonists Of America. No fraternity would have me in college, either. I think they know something.
BERKELEY BREATHED -
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.
BERKELEY BREATHED -
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.
BERKELEY BREATHED -
It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.
BERKELEY BREATHED -
I ignore Hallmark Holidays. And this comes from a guy who has sold a million Opus greeting cards.
BERKELEY BREATHED -
If I could have drawn a cat yelling for lasagna every day for 15 years and have them pay me $30 million to do so, I would have.
BERKELEY BREATHED -
I grew up in Los Angeles and always wished I’d spent a childhood in a far different place.
BERKELEY BREATHED -
A mind is a terrible thing. All this evolution nonsense is making me feel like a complete APE!
BERKELEY BREATHED -
I started as a news photographer at the University Of Texas’ Daily Texan.
BERKELEY BREATHED -
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.
BERKELEY BREATHED -
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.
BERKELEY BREATHED -
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.
BERKELEY BREATHED -
Irony can elude the genius among us, sometimes.
BERKELEY BREATHED -
Cartooning is about deconstruction: you gotta tear something down to make a joke.
BERKELEY BREATHED -
If you’ll read the subtext for many of those old strips, you’ll find the heart of an old-fashioned Libertarian. And I’d be a Libertarian, if they weren’t all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners.
BERKELEY BREATHED








