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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

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

Country News Photographer
He comic page is dying; I didn’t want to go with it.
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Dying Pages Want
My kids hear me behind my door, giggling like an idiot, and they roll their eyes at the blatant indignity of it all.
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Doors Eye Kids
I grew up in Los Angeles and always wished I’d spent a childhood in a far different place.
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Childhood Country Different
It was a huge challenge to learn digital painting well enough so that computers don’t pop into mind when one sees one.
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Challenges Digital Mind
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.
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Art Missing Wall
Some of us find our lives abridged even before the paperback comes out.
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Abridged Lives Our Paperback
I was never asked to join the Editorial Cartoonists Of America. No fraternity would have me in college, either. I think they know something.
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America College Thinking
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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Fascination Personality States
Liberal, shmiberal. That should be a new word. Shmiberal: one who is assumed liberal, just because he’s a professional whiner in the newspaper.
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Heart Libertarian Politics
A mind is a terrible thing. All this evolution nonsense is making me feel like a complete APE!
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Evolution Mind
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.
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Daughter Mom Mother
It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.
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Funny Happiness Happy
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.
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Anger Hands Heart
And just as it is with all proper grannies, she ordered me into my pink bunny jammies.
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Bunnies Granny Jammies
The universe throws us some obvious little pitches sometimes, and we need to be awake enough not to let them slip by.
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Littles Needs Sometimes
I ignore Hallmark Holidays. And this comes from a guy who has sold a million Opus greeting cards.
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Cards Guy Holiday
Doonesbury had the requisite and overwhelming influence in 1980, as it did on any college cartoonist who was paying attention, of course.
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Attention College Influence
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.
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Issues People Thinking
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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Affection Anyone Capable Country Dead Social
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.
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Comfort Cynical Heart
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.
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Paper Writing Years
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.
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Mind Portions Readership
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.
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Allow Artist Connection People
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.
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Children Goodbye Stupid
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.
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Adventure Boys Imagination
Irony can elude the genius among us, sometimes.
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Elude Genius Irony

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.

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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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