Quotes from Alison Bechdel

And in a way, you could say that my father's end was my beginning...Or more precisely, that the end of his lie coincided with the beginning of my truth

Watching everyone root through their psyche, it just delights me. Especially R. Crumb's stuff.

I just met someone who read Gone With the Wind 62 times for exactly that same reason. She couldn't bear that it wasn't real. She wanted to live in it.

I don't know, maybe it's because I was raised Catholic. Confession has always held a great appeal for me.

You can't live and write at the same time.

The writing is hard, and the drawing is fun. It's very satisfying to see a drawing start to come together.

I'm pretty illiterate when it comes to comics history.

My mother is, my father certainly was. They were kind of the local intelligentsia in the town where I grew up.

I suppose that a lifetime spent hiding one's erotic truth could have a cumulative renunciatory effect. Sexual shame is in itself a kind of death.

The satiric ethos of Mad was a much bigger childhood influence.

Sometimes I wish the writing and drawing were more integrated.

It's definitely part of it, that the men were having fun and doing the interesting things but also, I don't know, I'm just thinking more about gender and how maybe in some way I am more of a boy than a girl.

Yeah, I read Judy Blume. My mother didn't like that, but I read it anyhow.

What would happen if we spoke the truth?

I love Jules Feiffer. I didn't discover him until I was a little older.

Autobiographical comics, I love them. I love them.

When I was growing up in the 1960s, there was starting to be more books geared towards young adults.

That's all true, but there was something else going on for me as a kid, something about my gender identity that I haven't figured out yet. And that's one of the things I'm hoping to dissect and investigate in this memoir project.

Don't you kids get any ideas about dragging a trailer into the backyard. after you graduate from high school, i don't want to see you again.

But mostly, it's a book about my relationship with my father.

I probably read Harriet the Spy about 70,000 times.

I started to get bored with that stuff about only drawing men and I've taken it out of the slideshow.

I'll watch a movie only if it meets the following criteria: 1. It has to have at least two women in it. 2. Who talk to each other. 3. About something besides a man.

People really want to think that these things really happened. I don't know why that important, but I know that when I finish reading a novel or something, I want to know how much of that really happened to this author.