Alison Bechdel quotes:

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  • And partly, the worst thing you could do in my family was need something from someone. So physical strength represented an avenue of self-sufficiency to me.

  • Nancy Drew was always changing her outfits. I despised girls' clothing, I couldn't wait to get home from school and get out of it. The last thing I wanted to read was minute descriptions of Nancy's frocks.

  • At first I was glad for the help. My freshmen English class, "Mythology and Archetypal Experience," confounded me. I didn't understand why we couldn't just read books without forcing contorted interpretations on then

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

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

  • If there was ever a bigger pansy than my father, it was Marcel Proust.

  • My father once nearly came to blows with a female dinner guest about whether a particular patch of embroidery was fuchsia or magenta. But the infinite gradations of color in a fine sunset - from salmon to canary to midnight blue - left him wordless.

  • Was Daedalus really stricken with grief when Icarus fell into the sea? Or just disappointed by the design failure

  • Even drawing gray hair at all is difficult to render in black and white.

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

  • I get a lot of mail from men who really identify with Stuart, you know, Sparrow's boyfriend. I love that. Even though I used to say I wanted men to read the strip even though there weren't any men in it, so they'd be forced to identify with the women.

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

  • For some reason writing and drawing are very separate processes for me.

  • In a narcissistic cathexis, you invest more energy into your ideas about another person than in the actual, objective, external person. So the man who falls in love with beauty is quite different from the man who loves a girl and feels she is beautiful and can see what is beautiful about her.

  • Well, I'm always working on my comic strip and trying to, you know, keep cranking that out.

  • If it weren't for the unconventionality of my desires, my mind might never have been forced to reckon with my body.

  • 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.

  • Sometimes I wish the writing and drawing were more integrated.

  • It's a hard thing to age a character because you can't really suddenly give someone gray hair.

  • Writing this book feels like a completely different activity from writing my comic strip because it's about real life. I feel like I'm using a part of my brain that's been dormant until now.

  • Partly I resented being perceived as weak because I was a girl.

  • I just have this sort of entrepreneurial spirit and I work really hard at promoting myself.

  • How Horrid" has a slightly facetious tone that strikes me as Wildean. It appears to embrace the actual horror--puberty, public disgrace--then at the last second nimbly sidesteps it, laughing.

  • Mostly it was Mad magazine. And I did read a lot of - I had a subscription when I was little, but I also had access to some old collections, the little paperbacks of the really good stuff.

  • One of them is already having some menopausal symptoms. I'm working on that. I'm giving them all little lines under the eyes, trying to sort of make them age gracefully.

  • I'd been upstaged, demoted from protagonist in my own drama to comic relief in my parents' tragedy

  • I hope that I can get people to read it without having to change it. Especially now that the strip has more different kinds of characters. It's really not all lesbians any more.

  • Gatsby's self-willed metamorphosis from farm boy to prince is many ways identical to my father's. Like Gatsby, my father fueled this transformation with the colossal vitality of his illusion. Unlike Gatsby he did this on a school teacher's salary.

  • Four years after my father's death, when the subject of parents came up in conversation i would relate the information in a flat, matter-of-fact tone eager to detect in my listener the flinch of grief that eluded me.

  • 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.

  • Grief takes many forms, including the absence of grief.

  • But I read comic books. I read things like Richie Rich and Little Lulu.

  • It was a vicious cycle, though. The more gratification we found in our own geniuses, the more isolated we grew.

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

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

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

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

  • When I grew up, I studied karate for years. I got pretty strong, but eventually I had to acknowledge that I really didn't like fighting at all, so I quit.

  • The secret subversive goal of my work is to show that women, not just lesbians, are regular human beings.

  • I don't know how anyone gets anything done in New York City. I vastly prefer living in the country. I just need a lot of quiet and solitude, and I'm so easily distracted. I mean, the Internet is enough to deal with.

  • People really want to think that these things really happened. I don't know why that is 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.

  • 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.

  • I get to do for a living what I did as a child for fun, and that's pretty cool.

  • I wish I had a typical workday. I struggle to get up at seven and almost always fail. I just try to get to my office as soon as I can, but it's always later than I would like.

  • The web is my unconscious but it's also a wish -- a fantasy of what my own creativity might look like if I weren't constantly impeding its flow.

  • I try not to have anything too much going on between waking up and getting to work. I like to just be really fresh when I sit down. I always have my best ideas, like, within five minutes of starting. And then the rest of the day is just kind of putting in time.

  • Grief takes many forms, including the absence of grief

  • I never really read superhero stuff as a kid.

  • I tend to write first thing, and then do my drawing later. I like to draw at night. But often I go for long stretches without drawing, because I'm trying to figure out what I'm writing.

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

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

  • It was not a triumphal return. Home, as I had known it, was gone.

  • I still found literary criticism to be a suspect activity

  • Drawing is more fun to me than writing. I think it's interesting to talk to different cartoonists about how those activities work for them. I'm a very writerly cartoonist. I certainly spend more time on the writing than I do on the drawing, even though the drawing, of course, is very time-consuming.

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

  • Bechdel Test, was named for the comic strip it came from, penned by Alison Bechdel - but Bechdel credits a friend named Liz Wallace, so maybe it really should be called the Liz Wallace Test...? Anyway, the test is much simpler than the name. To pass it your movie must have the following: a) there are at least two named female characters, who b) talk to each other about c) something other than a man.

  • Who embalms the Undertaker when he dies?

  • I grew to resent the way my father treated his furniture like children, and his children like furniture.

  • Autobiographical comics, I love them. I love them.

  • She has given me a way out.

  • It's our very capacity for self-consciousness that makes us self-destructive!

  • It's imprecise and insufficient, defining the homosexual as a person whose gender expression is at odds with his or her sex.

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

  • 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.

  • What would happen if we spoke the truth?

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