Berkeley Breathed quotes:

I knew 'Mars Needs Moms! ' would be a movie seconds after the title came to mind. Similarly, I also knew that my daughter would be calling me a dork as a default term of endearment eventually.

I could draw Bloom County with my nose and pay my cleaning lady to write it, and I'd bet I wouldn't lose 10% of my papers over the next twenty years. Such is the nature of comic-strips. Once established, their half-life is usually more than nuclear waste.

Bloom County was set in a tidy, rural environment probably because of Harper Lee's 'To Kill a Mockingbird.'

I grew up in Los Angeles and always wished I'd spent a childhood in a far different place.

That's the conundrum of cartoon stripping, as opposed to political cartoons. When your anger is the driving force of your drawing hand, failure follows. The anger is OK, but it has to serve the interests of the heart, frankly.

I started as a news photographer at the University Of Texas' Daily Texan.

It's never too late to have a happy childhood.

I ignore Hallmark Holidays. And this comes from a guy who has sold a million Opus greeting cards.

Harry Potter' shouldn't be children's first experience with suspense and plot turns.

I happen to think nearly everybody - especially those one might find in the odd issue of 'People' magazine, including me - is frightfully boring, Especially me. And Tom Cruise. Tom and I are alike in only this way.

I knew 'Mars Needs Moms! ' would be a movie seconds after the title came to mind. Similarly, I also knew that my daughter would be calling me a dork as a default term of endearment eventually."

Such is the nature of comic strips. Once established, their half-life is usually more than nuclear waste. Typically, the end result is lazy, rich cartoonists.

Steve Dallas...a frat-boy lawyer who I knew in school. He's never written me. I suspect he was shot by an annoyed girlfriend, which has saved me many legal fees.

My post-child period resulted in one instant change: I write shorter books for kids.

Doonesbury had the requisite and overwhelming influence in 1980, as it did on any college cartoonist who was paying attention, of course.

Despite what they tell you, there are simply no moral absolutes in a complex world.

I can say that even in the midst of my most cynical comic stripping: Opus shone through with a bit of heart, anchoring the ugly proceedings with a comforting pull of emotion.

Keep in mind that in 1985, I had a potential readership of over 50 million Americans. At that time, a good portion of those were under 30.

Cartooning is about deconstruction: you gotta tear something down to make a joke.

I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners.

And that's why any of my picture books exist: They all seem to be built backwards from a simple, emotionally optimistic story beat.

I'll confess right here that I secretly wish I'd have drawn a strip about a little boy with a fake tiger, going for adventures throughout the universe in spaceships of his imagination.

I paint digitally now. A pity, in some ways, as the biggest price one pays is that you no longer have a finished piece of physical art to hang on a wall. I miss that terribly.

If I could have drawn a cat yelling for lasagna every day for 15 years and have them pay me $30 million to do so, I would have.

I will go to my grave in a state of abject endless fascination that we all have the capacity to become emotionally involved with a personality that doesn't exist.

Liberal, shmiberal. That should be a new word. Shmiberal: one who is assumed liberal, just because he's a professional whiner in the newspaper. If you'll read the subtext for many of those old strips, you'll find the heart of an old-fashioned Libertarian. And I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners.

I drew the last image ever of Opus at midnight while Puccini was playing and I got rather stupid. Thirty years. A bit like saying goodbye to a child - which is ironic because I was never, never sentimental about him as many of his fans were.

And just as it is with all proper grannies, she ordered me into my pink bunny jammies.

Some of us find our lives abridged even before the paperback comes out.

It was a huge challenge to learn digital painting well enough so that computers don't pop into mind when one sees one.

Dear Lord, I've been asked, nay commanded, to thank Thee for the Christmas turkey before us... a turkey which was no doubt a lively, intelligent bird... a social being... capable of actual affection... nuzzling its young with almost human- like compassion. Anyway, it's dead and we're gonna eat it. Please give our respects to its family...

The universe throws us some obvious little pitches sometimes, and we need to be awake enough not to let them slip by.

It's not terribly dignified to have anyone seeing one laugh at one's own material.

I don't get fan mail. It disappeared with the digital revolution.

My kids hear me behind my door, giggling like an idiot, and they roll their eyes at the blatant indignity of it all.

'Harry Potter' shouldn't be children's first experience with suspense and plot turns.

I hate smoothies. Because they won't offer Firestone IPA beer as an ingredient.

A mind is a terrible thing. All this evolution nonsense is making me feel like a complete APE!

He comic page is dying; I didn't want to go with it.

Irony can elude the genius among us, sometimes.

If nothing is serious anymore, then there's nothing to satirize.

The cartooning was always just an abstraction. It was an income. It was making me famous. It was allowing me to go and do other things that I'd wanted to do.

The digital world has allowed me a connection with my reader that I'd never had before. I didn't meet the people who read my material. The fan letters were mostly answered by professional people that'd done them for a living. And I didn't have any daily connection with their response to my work. I didn't have a relationship with my audience. And every artist should have it.