Quotes from Gary Larson

I didn't realize I was working in a family medium.

I love parasites! I can't get enough of them.

You should always leave the party 10 minutes before you actually do.

I think I'm maintaining the quality, but internally I'm paying for it.

On Career Day in high school, you don't walk around looking for the cartoon guy.

As for the reasons behind my retirement, they mostly center around simple fatigue and a fear that if I continue for many more years my work will begin to suffer, or at the very least ease into the graveyard of mediocre cartoons.

Cartooning was a good fit for me. And yet now, years later, I almost never think about it.

I didn't feel that my identity was caught up in being a cartoonist, and that if it stopped I'd stop.

I don't think I'd know if I were sitting next to Charles Schulz on an airplane.

Man Swims in Shark Infested Waters, Forgets He's Shark Food.

I've always considered music stores to be the graveyards of musicians.

Theme-park approach to nature. We judge plants and animals by whether they're entertaining to us. We gravitate toward animals and plants that are big, dramatic, beautiful and at eye-level.

The idea for any cartoon (my experience, anyway) is rarely spontaneous. Good ideas usually evolve out of pretty lame ones, and vice versa.

Great moments in science: Einstein discovers that time is actually money.

I don't know where my ideas come from. I will admit, however, that one key ingredient is caffeine. I get a couple cups of coffee into me and weird things just start to happen.

Humans have changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any comparable period of time in human history, largely to meet rapidly growing demands for food, fresh water, timber, fiber and fuel. This has resulted in a substantial and largely irreversible loss in the diversity of life on Earth.

The daily calendar seemed, to me, like a kind of cartoon black hole, and you didn't have to be a rocket scientist to know that that couldn't be sustained indefinitely. That's why I pulled the plug on that one after the '02 edition. Kind of a preemptive strike.

I didn't want to go to school for more than four years, and I didn't know what you did with a bachelor's in biology. So I switched over and got my degree in communications. I regret it now. It was one of the most idiotic things I ever did.

This was more than just a cow - this was an entire career I was looking at.

People try to look for deep meanings in my work. I want to say, 'They're just cartoons, folks. You laugh or you don't.' Gee, I sound shallow. But I don't react to current events or other stimuli. I don't read or watch TV to get ideas. My work is basically sitting down at the drawing table and getting silly.

Every week when my batch of weekly cartoons would go to FedEx, it felt like a small miracle. Then in a few days, it's 'Here we go again.'

The Bluebird of Happiness long absent from his life, Ned is visited by the Chicken of Depression.

People get very passionate about saving the whale, but when something like a Florida indigo snake is endangered there are not a lot of people out there holding up placards.

My future plans are hazy, and I've yet to experience how much cartooning is in my blood and therefore how much I'll miss it. But I have some other interests, especially in music, and I will probably take the opportunity to delve into those things more deeply.