“The down side of Americans being obsessed with pop culture is that they kind of like it light.”

Frivolity is a stern taskmaster.

Everyone says how Calvin and Hobbes is about a real kid, to me there’s nothing real about it; it’s an adult using a kid’s body as a mouthpiece.

What I do is draw but if you make an animated feature obviously it takes a whole team of people, and Zippy is my work. I felt that turning it over to a team of people would be wrong.

Jazz, rock and roll, movies and comics are the culture of America.

My first character was Mr. Toad.

I had a very diametrically opposite set of parents.

Comics is a language. It’s a language most people understand intuitively.

If something is going on in my life, it winds up getting into my strip.

I went to an art school in Brooklyn and painted Fine Art, if thats what youd call it for eight years in New York, until I saw the first underground comics in the East Village Other.

When I was an art student in the early 60′s before the acid scene began I was smoking pot just like anyone else who was an artist.

I guess if you take yourself seriously as an artist there starts either the problem or the beauty of doing good artwork.

Yes, but personally I was never a big acid head.

A full, rich drawing style is a drawback.

I just became one with my browser software.

Vegetarianism can easily reach religious proportions. Refraining from meat on moral grounds serves to dignify feelings of guilt toward sad-eyed, furry creatures and substitutes righteousness for squeamishness.

All life is a blur of Republicans and meat.

Like all magic cultures expressed by appropriate hieroglyphs, the true theater has its shadows too, and, of all languages and all arts, the theater is the only one left whose shadows have shattered their limitations.

Don’t tire yourself more than need be, even at the price of founding a culture on the fatigue of your bones.

Battle rap is a culture. That’s boxing, it’s like boxing.

As film-makers, it is very important for us to find common ground between cultures, and maybe that’s less the case for politicians who benefit more from finding the conflicts and differences between us.

Film is very much a universal and common voice, and we can’t limit it to one particular culture.

The Civic Culture (and The Civic Culture Revisited) remains the best study of comparative political culture in our time.

The experience of being on a show that is very much in the center of popular culture is exciting. You really feel like you’re reaching people.

The great joy of doing ‘The Daily Show’ for me is that I get to sit on the fence between cultures. I am commenting on the absurdity of both sides as an outsider and insider. Sometimes I’m playing the brown guy, and sometimes I’m not, but the best stuff I do always goes back to being a brown kid in a white world.