“I didn’t always spell my name Bil. My parents named me Bill, but when I started drawing cartoons on the wall, they knocked the ‘L’ out of me.”

In Roslyn, Pennsylvania, we started our real-life family circus. They provided the inspiration for my cartoons. I provided the perspiration.

I don’t have to come up with a ha-ha belly laugh every day, but drawings with warmth and love or ones that put a lump in the throat. That’s more important to me than a laugh.

I never studied art, but taught myself to draw by imitating the New Yorker cartoonists of that day, instead of doing my homework.

A peaceful home is as sacred a place as any chapel or cathedral.

I think it’s a novelty for cartoon characters to cross over into another strip or panel occasionally.

I like to feel that what I’m doing portrays this: a family where there is love between mother, father and the kids. It’s a subject that is near and dear to me.

Goal begins with “GO.”

Today is a gift of God, which is why we call it the present.

Many of my cartoons are not a belly laugh. I go for nostalgia, the lump in the throat, the tear in the eye, the tug in the heart.

A hug is like a boomerang – you get it back right away.

Yesterday’s the past, tomorrow’s the future, but today is a gift. That’s why it’s called the present.

OF COURSE I’d like to be the ideal mother. But I’m too busy raising children.

Sometimes I get the feeling that I’m stranded in the wrong time where love is just a lyric in a children’s rhyme

Oh simple thing, where have you gone? I’m getting old and I need something to rely on So tell me when you’re gonna let me in I’m getting tired and I need somewhere to begin.

Mommy would never divorce Daddy. He’s just like one of the family.

God put Santa Claus on earth to remind us that Christmas is ‘sposed to be a happy time.

Drawing need not be the bones of art, but skill must always be the skeleton of accomplishment.

Drawing is one of those things which sit on the uneasy bending line between instinct and instruction, where seeming perversity eventually trumps pleasure as the card players and the kibitzers interact and new thrills are sought.

The blankness invites scribbling on, mental drawing , and the best feeling I know – apart from the more obvious sensual ones – is the feeling of putting down the first thought and seeing it turn into symbols.

Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.

This kind of painting with its large frames is a bourgeois drawing-room art. It is an art dealer’s art-and that came in after the civil wars following the French Revolution.

A people who have suffered so much for so long at the hands of a racist society must draw the line somewhere.

If we master a bit of drawing, everything else is possible.

I’ve been fifty thousand times to the Louvre. I have copied everything in drawing, trying to understand.