“It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.”

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 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.

Good and bad, happy and sad, all thoughts vanish into emptiness like the imprint of a bird in the sky.

We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.

I worked out what would make me happy, and I worked out what I wanted to do, and I trained myself to do the job that would make those two things happen

I certainly wasn’t happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can’t earn, and can’t keep, and often don’t even recognize at the time; I mean joy.

Being nice? Hes being horny.

You can cry for a little bit, eat some ice cream, but I think, after that, it’s like, get up, listen to some powerful music and do something that makes you happy, be productive.

Seeing Cubism paintings at the Beaubourg makes me very happy and also old films.

Dont panic, i thought. But already my breathing was faster, shallower. You mean you can feel happy or sad or desire. A barely-there smile.