Quotes from Lynda Barry

I tried to be like the richer kids as much as I could because I wanted to live on their streets, at least hang out on their streets and eat their amazing food and walk barefoot on their shag carpets. I became something of a pest in that way, and in general, other people's parents didn't like me.

When you are little, you will draw pictures for no reason.

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.

Remember how you used to be able to feel your bed breathing and the walls spinning when you were a kid?

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.

When you think about it, giving up your real personality is a small price to pay for the richness of living happily ever after with an actual man!

As I enter the small intestine I get squeezed by muscles. Its dark and the walls look like slimey crushed velvet theres pancreas juice on me help me I am disintigrating.

I remember my comic strips being called 'new wave.' It bugged me.

Sometimes I think I'm the craziest person on the planet.

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.

I found myself compelled - like this weird, shameful compulsion - to draw cute animals.

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.

When I was working on 'Freddie,' I had been trying to write it on a computer for many, many years, but that delete button just won't let anything go forward.

I am about as detailed as a shadow.

'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.

Whenever I do a book, I'm usually guided by a question or something that I'm trying to tease out.

In life there are always these things happening if you can just get the joke.

I used to live a very social life and never spend much solitary time looking at birds or reading.

One by one most kids I knew quit drawing and never drew again. It left behind too much evidence.

Something can only become an illusion after disillusionment. Before that, it is something real.

are memories pictures or the secret doorway?

but paper and ink have conjuring abilities of their own. arrangements of lines and shapes, of letters and words on a series of pages make a world we can dwell and travel in.

Then how can you ever know about the beautiful goodness of Mud? How bad it wants to be things. How bad it wants to get on your legs and arms and take your footprints and handprints and how bad it wants you to make it alive! Mud is always ready to play with you. Seriously you should try it!

Same circus, different clowns, and without a doubt I'm one of them.