Quotes About Matt Groening

Because good writing in a TV cartoon is so rare, I think the animation on The Simpsons is often overlooked.

America's health care system is second only to Japan, Canada, Sweden, Great Britain, well ... all of Europe. But you can thank your lucky starts we don't live in Paraguay!

I had been drawing my weekly comic strip, 'Life in Hell,' for about five years when I got a call from Jim Brooks, who was developing 'The Tracey Ullman Show' for the brand-new Fox network. He wanted me to come in and pitch an idea for doing little cartoons on that show.

I like the 'Simpsons' pinball machines. Those are pretty great.

Our solution on 'The Simpsons' is to do jokes that people who have an education, or some frame of reference, can get. And for the ones who don't, it doesn't matter, because we have Homer banging his head and saying, 'D'oh!'

'The Simpsons' obviously is a huge success, and Fox has nothing to do with its success, with its creative success, and as a result they don't really like the show. They don't like 'The Simpsons' at Fox.

The nice thing about 'Futurama' for me personally was that it was a way to honor some of the traditional ideas in literary science fiction, not so much movie or television science fiction - although we have that too, obviously. Our situation, a workplace comedy, led to all sorts of stuff.

With 'Futurama,' I was just worried that somebody would beat us to it; it seemed so obvious that there should be an animated science fiction show set in the future. And one of the reasons why it's not, I learned, is that it's really, really difficult.

[I spent] much of my time reminding Matt Groening that I really need to be a head in a jar on Futurama.

Back in high school, I wrote a novel about a character named Bart Simpson. I thought it was a very unusual name for a kid at the time. I had this idea of an angry father yelling 'Bart,' and Bart sounds kind of like bark - like a barking dog.

In 'Futurama,' the skin color is no longer yellow. They have actually evolved to cartoon skin tone. But they still have four fingers.

The best stories in our culture have some sort of subversiveness - Mark Twain, 'Catcher in the Rye.' You provide kids with great stories and teach them how to use the tools to make their own.

Science fiction and comedy are generally a pretty bumpy mix.

I like all of the early relationship strips that were collected in 'Love Is Hell,' where I pretended to be an expert in relationships and did comics like 'The Nine Types of Boyfriends,' 'Sixteen Ways to End a Relationship,' 'Twenty-Four Things Not to Say in Bed,' and other arbitrarily numbered lists.

With Charlie Brown, it was about loneliness and isolation. I always thought that the thing about Charlie Brown and those characters was the absence of the parents. Half the strip was about who wasn't there. The parents were never in the picture.

Lisa: 'Do we have any food that wasn't brutally slaughtered?' Homer: 'Well, I think the veal died of loneliness.'

All normal people love meat. If I went to a barbeque and there was no meat, I would say, "Yo Goober! Where's the meat?" I'm trying to impress people here, Lisa. You don't win friends with salad.

Do my worst, eh? Smithers, release the robotic Richard Simmons." --Mr. Burns

One year later, I got beat up at a Neil Diamond concert by a guy named Scrunchie!

I'm presently incarcerated. Convicted of a crime I didn't even commit. Hah! "Attempted murder"? Now honestly, what is that? Do they give a Nobel prize for attempted chemistry? Do they?