“A dog does not live as long as a man and this natural law is the fount of many tears. If boy and puppy might grow to manhood and doghood together, and together grow old.”

Life is the acceptance of responsibilities or their evasion; it is a business of meeting obligations or avoiding them.

To every man the choice is continually being offered, and by the manner of his choosing you may fairly measure him.

An author never has a vacation. He’s a walking sponge, sopping up impressions till he’s saturated, then going to his desk and squeezing them out on paper.

And so in due course die, full many a heartache might be avoided. But the world is not so ordered, and dogs will die and men will weep for them so long as there are dogs and men.

I know patients who bring a dozen roses to the doctor’s office. And, boy, the next visit, nobody forgets that. You come in and hey – ‘Here’s the lady who brought the roses’ vs. ‘Here’s the lung cancer.’

A lot of my fears and anxieties are the fears and anxieties of a six-year-old boy. When I finally confront them, they’re really small.

For a moment man is a boy, for a moment a lovesick youth, for a moment bereft of wealth, for a moment in the height of prosperity; then at life’s end with limbs worn out by old age and wrinkles adorning his face, like an actor he retires behind the curtain of death.

I was painfully shy when I was younger but at some point you’ve gotta grow up. I think the genius in the man-boy thing is you tap into a woman’s motherly instincts.

You’d look out and there’d be little babies watching the show, and boys and girls. They loved the cowboys, and they loved Annie. There were young people seeing the show for the first time. I stayed for two years because I enjoyed it so much.

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.

Give a boy a dog and you’ve furnished him a playmate.