“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.

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.

Liberal, shmiberal. That should be a new word. Shmiberal: one who is assumed liberal, just because he’s a professional whiner in the newspaper.

Dear Lord, I’ve been asked, nay commanded, to thank Thee for the Christmas turkey before us…

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.

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.

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.

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.

To me, it all comes down to things being character-driven. It’s hard for me to look beyond that. CG and all this cool stuff – so be it. But to me, it pretty much begins and ends with character-driven plots rather than technologically-driven plots.

“Novels and gardens,” she says. “I like to move from plot to plot.”

The CIA has a plot…they’ve used before to get rid of world leaders. Only problem…is convincing Hussein…to fly to Dallas.

The cliches are that it’s the most generic Starsky and Hutch plot you can find.

There are those who maintain that in this world women have no right to interfere in the affairs of state, in politics, in plots and counter-plots.

Bigotrys birthplace is the sinister back room of the mind where plots and schemes are hatched for the persecution and oppression of other human beings.

I don’t really care about plot; I want to have a page-turner in a different kind of way.

My stories do have plot. They’re not just scattered language; they’re controlled, toward an end.