Bruce Eric Kaplan quotes:

Shooting in Los Angeles is always pleasant and comfortable. Shooting in New York is like being on 'Survivor.'

One identity is as a television writer, which is very classically Southern California, but another of my personae is as a New Yorker cartoonist.

One quintessential moment in time is when you're 22, when you graduate college. And then another quintessential time is as a middle-age man. That's the convergence.

What I like about graduation speeches is that they're an opportunity for someone to make sense of their life and to impart that wisdom to someone else. It's like a sanctioned self-help moment.

Of course I loved 'I Love Lucy' and saw every episode over and over again. I found it heartbreaking that Ricky got to be famous and have an exciting life at the Tropicana while Lucy was stuck in that terrible apartment with the Mertzes.

In Los Angeles, it's always nice out. In New York, it can be nice out or horrifying. You really have no idea what you're going to get on any given day.

I love graduation speeches. I have always loved them; I will always love them.

My mother always bought our birthday gifts.

My cartoon life is in my office, and it's very separate and getting very in my own head. My television life is I'm begging one of the actors to say the line in the way I'd like them to.

It was memorable the first time 'The New Yorker' bought a cartoon from me. I had been sending them batches for years every week, and they didn't respond to them.

I always doodled as a kid while I was talking on the phone or watching TV.

I read the 'New Yorker' when I was a kid. I used to love the cartoons and pick the cartoons out of the library, so I felt I knew the world of their cartoons.

I've had mostly book parties, where I get very focused on inviting everyone and not forgetting anyone, although of course one always does, and being worried no one will show up, but mostly the book comes from going to parties and feeling very, for lack of a better word, anxious.

It's not like during your normal day, anyone says, 'How do having meaning in your life? How do you make meaning in your life?'

In L.A., you can put out a craft-service table anywhere, and it's no big deal. But in New York, people who walk by it on the street get really angry about it.

I loved Charles Addams more than anything. Still love him.

I started trying to be a writer and failed for years. I tried novels, short stories, sitcoms, movies, plays, anything. And then, to support myself, I had millions of jobs on the fringes of show business.

I can't get enough of self-help books of all kinds.

All I can really tell you about my father is that he did odd things like put tin foil on a bottle of beer after having a few sips, then put it in the refrigerator to perhaps have on another night.

My father would often start to say something, then say 'Forget it.'

No, I never - no one ever - I never learned anything when I was a kid. Honestly, my parents had nothing to tell me - like, no wisdom, nothing.

I am assuming my father learned at an early age that there is nothing more dangerous than showing your true self. I think a lot of us learn that, and it actually may be true.

As an adult, it's hard for me to remember my mother before her sickness. But if I go back into childhood, I can access that.

Graduation speeches force you to reflect. They are about consciousness. Nothing is better than consciousness.

We are all just little dolls of ourselves. Who occasionally pull back the curtains to reveal the real us.

My mother couldn't take having three boys. She was extremely jumpy, to say the least. Any noise startled her. The sound of a pot dropping on the ground could make her hit the ceiling.

I was trying to be a writer, and I was kind of getting sidetracked, so I started doing cartoons as a form of expression.

Yes, the people I draw don't have a wide variety of looks. Every now and then I'll spruce it up, like a woman will be wearing a two-piece suit as opposed to a one-piece, or a man will not be wearing a tie; he'll just have a collar.