“A full, rich drawing style is a drawback.”

Then I abandoned comics for fine art because I had some romantic vision of being like Vincent Van Gogh Jr.

Frivolity is a stern taskmaster.

Everyone says how Calvin and Hobbes is about a real kid, to me there’s nothing real about it; it’s an adult using a kid’s body as a mouthpiece.

What I do is draw but if you make an animated feature obviously it takes a whole team of people, and Zippy is my work. I felt that turning it over to a team of people would be wrong.

Jazz, rock and roll, movies and comics are the culture of America.

My first character was Mr. Toad.

I had a very diametrically opposite set of parents.

Comics is a language. It’s a language most people understand intuitively.

If something is going on in my life, it winds up getting into my strip.

The down side of Americans being obsessed with pop culture is that they kind of like it light.

I went to an art school in Brooklyn and painted Fine Art, if thats what youd call it for eight years in New York, until I saw the first underground comics in the East Village Other.

When I was an art student in the early 60′s before the acid scene began I was smoking pot just like anyone else who was an artist.

I guess if you take yourself seriously as an artist there starts either the problem or the beauty of doing good artwork.

Yes, but personally I was never a big acid head.

I just became one with my browser software.

Vegetarianism can easily reach religious proportions. Refraining from meat on moral grounds serves to dignify feelings of guilt toward sad-eyed, furry creatures and substitutes righteousness for squeamishness.

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.

When I make my drawings… the path traced by my pencil on the sheet of paper is, to some extent, analogous to the gesture of a man groping his way in the darkness.