Quotes from Garry Trudeau

When you're young, with less on the line, it's easier to be audacious, to experiment. So I introduced the concerns of my generation - politics, sex, drugs, rock-and-roll, etc. - to the comics page, which for many years caused a rolling furor.

Lives have been altered in fundamental ways, and later, after they acquire a more complete understanding of what goals are actually attainable, many are left facing a lot of pain and frustration. And yet, there's no culture of complaint.

Becoming the new feminine ideal requires just the right combination of insecurity, exercise, bulimia and surgery.

Once a week, I am a very desperate man.

The poor are the only ones who suffer. And they're used to it.

Most writers seem to prefer the morning, or they feel at their best in the morning. Ideas are popping into your head while you're in the shower. And that's true for me, as well.

I think it's very dangerous for people who do anything that's public to venture on the Web and check out what people are saying about them. Yes, you're bound to find things that will delight you - but you also find things that will make you brood and feel bad about yourself. Why would you intentionally invite that into your life?

In their heyday, comics were a dominant force in popular culture, but that's over.

Comic-strip artists generally have very modest ambitions. Day to day, we labor to fit together all these little moving parts - a character or two, a few lines of dialogue, framing, pacing, payoff - but we certainly don't think of them adding up over time to some larger portrait of our times.

As far as I'm concerned, there is no subject that's off the table.

I'm still passionately interested in what my fellow humans are up to. For me, a day spent monitoring the passing parade is a day well-spent.

Medical decisions have been politicized. What doctor wants a state legislator in his consulting room?

I found that not having a public profile was not hurting the work, and it freed me up to be the satirist I wanted to be.

There's always been some concern that adult subject matter should be quarantined from a page that attracts children. Unlike late at night, when 'South Park' and 'Colbert' are on, impressionable minds are wide awake when the newspaper arrives.

Life is like a movie-since there aren't any commercial breaks, you have to get up and go to the bathroom in the middle of it.

For the most part, editors no longer view 'Doonesbury' as a rolling provocation, which is fine by me. It makes no sense to intentionally antagonize the very people on whose support you most depend.

I've been getting pulled from newspapers for my entire career.

I don't want to sound disingenuous here - controversy is obviously good for business, especially if your business is satire. And it does amplify the discussion - in my view, a good thing.

That's what fiction writers do: create characters and do terrible things to them for the entertainment of others. If they feel guilty enough, they write happy endings.

I try to take people one at a time, with all the contradictions and compromises that most of us live with.

I'm a pointillist, just working my tiny little piece of the canvas. I'm not so good at perspective.

I'm a reader of milblogs, but as with all blogs, the wheat/chaff ratio makes it a poor investment of time.

There is nothing worse than annotated humour.

I can only try to keep the characters interesting; it's up to the readers to decide whether they're still relevant.