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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

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
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.
BERKELEY BREATHED

Comfort Cynical Heart
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
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 don’t get fan mail. It disappeared with the digital revolution.
BERKELEY BREATHED

Digital Revolution Fans Mail
And just as it is with all proper grannies, she ordered me into my pink bunny jammies.
BERKELEY BREATHED

Bunnies Granny Jammies
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
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
Irony can elude the genius among us, sometimes.
BERKELEY BREATHED

Elude Genius Irony
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 paint digitally now. A pity, in some ways, as the biggest price one pays is that you no longer have a finished piece of physical art to hang on a wall. I miss that terribly.
BERKELEY BREATHED

Art Missing Wall
I grew up in Los Angeles and always wished I’d spent a childhood in a far different place.
BERKELEY BREATHED

Childhood Country Different
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

Affection Anyone Capable Country Dead Social
Harry Potter’ shouldn’t be children’s first experience with suspense and plot turns.
BERKELEY BREATHED

Children Plot Suspense
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
It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.
BERKELEY BREATHED

Funny Happiness Happy
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
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 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
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
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.
BERKELEY BREATHED

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

Laughing Materials Seeing
He comic page is dying; I didn’t want to go with it.
BERKELEY BREATHED

Dying Pages Want
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
Dear Lord, I’ve been asked, nay commanded, to thank Thee for the Christmas turkey before us…
BERKELEY BREATHED

Christmas Food Funny
The universe throws us some obvious little pitches sometimes, and we need to be awake enough not to let them slip by.
BERKELEY BREATHED

Littles Needs Sometimes
Cartooning is about deconstruction: you gotta tear something down to make a joke.
BERKELEY BREATHED

Deconstruction Jokes Tears

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.

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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.

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Popular Authors

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