Quotes from Stephan Pastis

It's best to love your family as you would a Siberian tiger-from a distance, preferably separated by bars.

I don't like drawing characters facing right. If I tried to do that at a book signing, I'd have to pencil it first.

If a restaurant offers crayons, I always take them and color throughout the meal. It beats talking to the people I came to dinner with.

I recently forced myself to read a book on quantum physics, just to try and learn something new. I was confused by the middle of the first sentence and it all went downhill from there. The only thing I can remember learning is that a parallel universe can theoretically be contained on the head of a needle. I don't really know what that means, but I am now more careful handling needles.

When I say 'friends,' I use that term loosely, as I don't actually have any.

I'm very harsh on real estate agents. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because of how the call every small house 'charming' and every run-down house a 'great fixer-upper'. Just once, I'd like them to show me a house and declare, 'This one's a piece of crap'.

It's best to love your family as you would a Siberian tiger-from a distance, preferably separated by bars.

Perhaps it is a secret yearning of all Hallmark employees to use the phrase 'you big fat pain in the butt' in an anniversary card.

Most poetry just confounds me. I really want to like it, but I can't help thinking it's a hoax. (p. 24)

Whenever I see people with their collars up, I'm tempted to point it out to them like you would for someone who has a food stain on their shirt or food in their teeth, as if to say, 'Your fashion sense is so offensive I'm assuming it's some sort of accident you'll want to fix.

The phrase 'I just turn on my monkey and it makes me feel good' sounds very dirty, but I can't explain why. It's great to try to use expressions like that on the comics page. People want to complain but they can't, because they can't figure out quite what they should be complaining about.

When people bore me, I close my eyes and try to remember the order the Seven Dwarfs marched in. But it's not always the dwarfs I think about. Sometimes aI try to list all of the Canadian provinces.

I seem to be able to get away with pun strips if I add a panel at the end where I somehow indicate that I know it's a bad pun.

When I was at the University of California at Berkeley, I went to some classes that must have had more than four hundred students in them. I almost always sat in the far back of the auditorium so I could read the newspaper. I remember that I stayed late one day to ask the professor a question, and when I got up to him, all I could think to myself was, 'So this is what the professor looks like.

I know that if I am to move forward like the professional that I am, I must first see the past with mature eyes. And that means acknowledging that others have caused all my problems and blaming them for it.

You act like a team player,you be nice to everyone for your entire life,then you die.

When you can't draw chameleons and you can't draw blenders, it's a bad idea to write strips where chameleons become blenders.

Man, I put myself in a lot of comic strips. Something's wrong with my sense of self.

I put Post-It notes everywhere to remind me of everything. I stick a ton of them on my computer monitor, telephone, and wallet. The problem now is that there are so many of them that my mind has blocked them all out. So I now need Post-It notes to remind me to look at my Post-It notes.

Me no read. Look how smart me is.

Humility is what you strive for when you've failed at everything else.

Gary Larson: The funniest cartoonist I've ever seen. His two-volume set (The Complete Far Side) should be the textbook in any course taught on how to be funny on the comics page.

One funny image can sometimes save an otherwise mediocre strip. At least that's what I tell myself so I don't feel quite as crappy when I've just wasted four hours drawing and coloring a Sunday strip.

Everyone cites [Charles Schulz], but it's with good reason. He taught me timing, tone, character development, practically everything.