“I can say that even in the midst of my most cynical comic stripping: Opus shone through with a bit of heart, anchoring the ugly proceedings with a comforting pull of emotion.”

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.

I ignore Hallmark Holidays. And this comes from a guy who has sold a million Opus greeting cards.

Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.

And I really do believe that the most important thing is the way you live your life on earth. But I think it’s enormously comforting to believe that you’re going to see your loved ones.

When things get really bad, you take comfort in the placeness of a place.

When you’re stuck sitting in a comfort zone, small problems become magnified. Get out of your comfort zone, touch the edge, and you come back with an appreciation for life.

It is not that we have class prejudice, but only that we find comfort and ease in our own class. And normally there are plenty of people of our own class, or race, or religion to play, live, and eat with, and to marry.

Friendship is the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words.

I think my quarry is illusion. I war against magic. I believe that, though illusion often cheers and comforts, it ultimately and invariably weakens and constricts the spirit.