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A turkey which was no doubt a lively, intelligent bird… a social being… capable of actual affection… nuzzling its young with almost human- like compassion. Anyway, it’s dead and we’re gonna eat it. Please give our respects to its family.

Berkeley Breathed

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

Laughing Materials Seeing
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.
BERKELEY BREATHED

Connection Fans Living Material Relationship Work
I grew up in Los Angeles and always wished I’d spent a childhood in a far different place.
BERKELEY BREATHED

Childhood Country Different
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

Dodging Fashioned Libertarian Many Old Subject
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

America College Thinking
I’d be a Libertarian, if they weren’t all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners.
BERKELEY BREATHED

Bunch Libertarian Subtext
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.
BERKELEY BREATHED

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

Christmas Food Funny
Some of us find our lives abridged even before the paperback comes out.
BERKELEY BREATHED

Abridged Lives Our Paperback
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.
BERKELEY BREATHED

Allow Artist Connection People
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.
BERKELEY BREATHED

Daughter Mom Mother
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.
BERKELEY BREATHED

Paper Writing Years
I don’t get fan mail. It disappeared with the digital revolution.
BERKELEY BREATHED

Digital Revolution Fans Mail
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.
BERKELEY BREATHED

Adventure Boys Imagination
Doonesbury had the requisite and overwhelming influence in 1980, as it did on any college cartoonist who was paying attention, of course.
BERKELEY BREATHED

Attention College Influence
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

Anger Hands Heart
Harry Potter’ shouldn’t be children’s first experience with suspense and plot turns.
BERKELEY BREATHED

Children Plot Suspense
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

Fascination Personality States
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

Abstraction Income Wanted
He comic page is dying; I didn’t want to go with it.
BERKELEY BREATHED

Dying Pages Want
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

Cat Years Yelling
Cartooning is about deconstruction: you gotta tear something down to make a joke.
BERKELEY BREATHED

Deconstruction Jokes Tears
I started as a news photographer at the University Of Texas’ Daily Texan.
BERKELEY BREATHED

Country News Photographer
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.
BERKELEY BREATHED

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

Challenges Digital Mind
Irony can elude the genius among us, sometimes.
BERKELEY BREATHED

Elude Genius Irony
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

Boys Girlfriend School

A turkey which was no doubt a lively, intelligent bird… a social being… capable of actual affection… nuzzling its young with almost human- like compassion. Anyway, it’s dead and we’re gonna eat it. Please give our respects to its family.

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A turkey which was no doubt a lively, intelligent bird… a social being… capable of actual affection… nuzzling its young with almost human- like compassion. Anyway, it’s dead and we’re gonna eat it. Please give our respects to its family.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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