Lynda Barry
I do love to eavesdrop. It's inspirational, not only for subject matter but for actual dialogue, the way people talk.Collection: Inspirational
If I didn't try to eavesdrop on every bus ride I take or look for the humor when I go for a walk, I would just be depressed all the time.Collection: Humor
Humor is such a wonderful thing, helping you realize what a fool you are but how beautiful that is at the same time.Collection: Humor
If it is your time, love will track you down like a cruise missile.Collection: Love
Remember when you were in school and the teacher would put a picture under an overhead projector so you could see it on the wall? God, I loved that. Tellya the truth, I used to look at that beam of light and think it was God.Collection: Teacher
My goal on my bucket list is to write a romantic comedy movie.Collection: Romantic
We don't create a fantasy world to escape reality. We create it to be able to stay.
I am about as detailed as a shadow.
Love is an exploding cigar we willingly smoke.
I run a tight ship, but I try and make it seem like I'm not doing that at all.
The happy ending is hardly important, though we may be glad it's there. The real joy is knowing that if you felt the trouble in the story, your kingdom isn't dead.
For 'Picture This,' I wanted it to be a drawing book that didn't have any instructions about drawing, beyond the real simple stuff you'd find like in a Bazooka bubblegum wrapper, or in 'Highlights' magazine. I just wanted it to be feelings about looking and seeing and pictures.
Going on Letterman is like going off the high dive. It's exhilarating, but after a while it wasn't the kind of thrill I enjoyed.
I go to work the minute I open my eyes.
I look crazy. I know I do. Been true since I was a kid!
I've gotten a lot of livid letters about the awfulness of my work. I've never known what to make of it. Why do people bother to write if they hate what I do?
For horror movies, color is reassuring because, at least in older films, it adds to the fakey-ness.
I think of images as an immune system and a transit system.
If I had had me for a student I would have thrown me out of class immediately.
I wasn't afraid to be laughed at or be loud.
I need to be cheered up a lot. I think funny people are people who need to be cheered up.
I listen like mad to any conversation taking place next to me just trying to hear why this is funny. Women's restrooms are especially great. I wash my hands twice waiting for people to come in and start talking.
I do dumb stuff, like playing my favorite dumb Barry White song and lip-synching into the mirror so it looks like his voice is coming out of my mouth.
Cartoonist was the weirdest name I finally let myself have. I would never say it. When I heard it I silently thought, what an awful word.
I started doing cartoons when I was about 21. I never thought I would be a cartoonist. It happened behind my back. I was always a painter and drawer.
I was unable to sleep and I would stay up and draw these little cartoons. Then a friend showed them around. Before I knew it I was a cartoonist.
The strips are nearly effortless unless I am really emotionally upset, a wreck.
Remember how you used to be able to feel your bed breathing and the walls spinning when you were a kid?
People think that whatever I put into strips has happened to me in my life.
There was a beautiful time in the beginning when I just did it and didn't analyze the consequences, but I think that time ends in everyone's work.
In life there are always these things happening if you can just get the joke.
Race and class are the easiest divisions. It's very stupid.
I used to live a very social life and never spend much solitary time looking at birds or reading.
I am not sure how much I would like being married if I wasn't married to him. A man who likes flea markets and isn't gay? I knew I was lucky.
Love will make a way out of no way.
I grew up in a house that had a whole lot of trouble. As much trouble as you could imagine.
Sometimes I think I'm the craziest person on the planet.
Whenever I do a book, I'm usually guided by a question or something that I'm trying to tease out.
I found myself compelled - like this weird, shameful compulsion - to draw cute animals.
I live in constant fear of being fired or dropped for that dark part of my work I can't control.
The library was open for one hour after school let out. I hid there, looking at art books and reading poetry.
I remember my comic strips being called 'new wave.' It bugged me.
My mom didn't want me to go to college. She didn't want me to read - when I read, I may as well have been holding a pineapple.
It's one thing to have a relationship, to lay your hands on it, and another to make it continue and last. That's something I haven't talked about much in my comic strips, and it's certainly something I'm interested in.
Part of a horror movie has to be a bit fakey for me to really enjoy it. The new ones are so realistic that they distract me from the ride through the horror.
Kids don't plan to play. They don't go: 'Barbie, Ken, you ready to play? It's gonna be a three-act.'
'What It Is' was based on this class I've been teaching for 10 years - I wanted to write a book about writing that didn't mention stuff like story structure, protagonists, and all those things that we know about only because they already exist in stories.
When you learn about stories in school, you get it backward. You start to think 'Oh, the reason these things are in stories is because a book said I need to put these things in there.' You need a death, as my husband says, and you need a little sidekick with a saying like 'Skivel-dee-doo!'
When I work on a book, I usually start with a question. And I don't sit around and go 'I need to write a book. What's a good question?' It will be a question that's just clanging around in my head. So for 'What It Is,' it was this idea of 'What is an image?'
It's much easier to teach writing, because people are less shy about writing. If they're in a group, nobody can see what they're writing. When you're drawing, people get a little more nervous.