Lynda Barry quotes:

When you think about it, giving up your 'real' personality is a small price to pay for the richness of 'living happily ever after' with an actual man!

The library was open for one hour after school let out. I hid there, looking at art books and reading poetry.

Good Times' is a story about the loss of innocence, how adults are responsible for their actions but children aren't.

I do love to eavesdrop. It's inspirational, not only for subject matter but for actual dialogue, the way people talk.

My goal on my bucket list is to write a romantic comedy movie.

Love will make a way out of no way.

I think of images as an immune system and a transit system.

It's one thing to have a relationship, to lay your hands on it, and another to make it continue and last. That's something I haven't talked about much in my comic strips, and it's certainly something I'm interested in.

In my writing class, we never, ever talk about the writing - ever. We never address a story that's been read. I also won't let anyone look at the person who's reading. No eye contact; everybody has to draw a spiral. And I would like to do a drawing class where we could talk about anything except for the drawing. No one could even mention it.

The happy ending is hardly important, though we may be glad it's there. The real joy is knowing that if you felt the trouble in the story, your kingdom isn't dead.

I've gotten a lot of livid letters about the awfulness of my work. I've never known what to make of it. Why do people bother to write if they hate what I do?

There was a beautiful time in the beginning when I just did it and didn't analyze the consequences, but I think that time ends in everyone's work.

When I was working on 'Freddie,' I had been trying to write it on a computer for many, many years, but that delete button just won't let anything go forward.

For 'Picture This,' I wanted it to be a drawing book that didn't have any instructions about drawing, beyond the real simple stuff you'd find like in a Bazooka bubblegum wrapper, or in 'Highlights' magazine. I just wanted it to be feelings about looking and seeing and pictures.

I live in constant fear of being fired or dropped for that dark part of my work I can't control.

I go to work the minute I open my eyes.

Playing and fun are not the same thing, though when we grow up we may forget that and find ourselves mixing up playing with happiness. There can be a kind of amnesia about the seriousness of playing, especially when we played by ourselves.

Race and class are the easiest divisions. It's very stupid.

We don't create a fantasy world to escape reality. We create it to be able to stay.

I tried to be like the richer kids as much as I could because I wanted to live on their streets, at least hang out on their streets and eat their amazing food and walk barefoot on their shag carpets. I became something of a pest in that way, and in general, other people's parents didn't like me.

Remember when you were in school and the teacher would put a picture under an overhead projector so you could see it on the wall? God, I loved that. Tellya the truth, I used to look at that beam of light and think it was God.

Sometimes I think I'm the craziest person on the planet.

When you learn about stories in school, you get it backward. You start to think 'Oh, the reason these things are in stories is because a book said I need to put these things in there.' You need a death, as my husband says, and you need a little sidekick with a saying like 'Skivel-dee-doo!'

I listen like mad to any conversation taking place next to me just trying to hear why this is funny. Women's restrooms are especially great. I wash my hands twice waiting for people to come in and start talking.

It's not hard for me to be funny in front of people, but most of that is just horrified nerves taking the form of what makes people laugh, and afterwards I'd always feel dreadfully depressed, kind of self-induced bi-polar disorder.

It's much easier to teach writing, because people are less shy about writing. If they're in a group, nobody can see what they're writing. When you're drawing, people get a little more nervous.

I grew up in a house that had a whole lot of trouble. As much trouble as you could imagine.

People think that whatever I put into strips has happened to me in my life.

I look crazy. I know I do. Been true since I was a kid!

I used to live a very social life and never spend much solitary time looking at birds or reading.

I need to be cheered up a lot. I think funny people are people who need to be cheered up.

Part of a horror movie has to be a bit fakey for me to really enjoy it. The new ones are so realistic that they distract me from the ride through the horror.

I am not sure how much I would like being married if I wasn't married to him. A man who likes flea markets and isn't gay? I knew I was lucky.

Then how can you ever know about the beautiful goodness of Mud? How bad it wants to be things. How bad it wants to get on your legs and arms and take your footprints and handprints and how bad it wants you to make it alive! Mud is always ready to play with you. Seriously you should try it!"

Cartoonist was the weirdest name I finally let myself have. I would never say it. When I heard it I silently thought, what an awful word.

I started doing cartoons when I was about 21. I never thought I would be a cartoonist. It happened behind my back. I was always a painter and drawer.

Remember how you used to be able to feel your bed breathing and the walls spinning when you were a kid?

I was unable to sleep and I would stay up and draw these little cartoons. Then a friend showed them around. Before I knew it I was a cartoonist.

Love is an exploding cigar we willingly smoke.

If it is your time, love will track you down like a cruise missile.

The thing that really struck me when I went to junior high was class. I grew up on a pretty poor street, but the school district I was in included some fine neighborhoods - so I got to know a couple of the kids from those places and went to their houses and experienced such culture shock.

If I didn't try to eavesdrop on every bus ride I take or look for the humor when I go for a walk, I would just be depressed all the time.

The strips are nearly effortless unless I am really emotionally upset, a wreck.

If I could only turn the etch-a-sketch of my life upside down.

Going on Letterman is like going off the high dive. It's exhilarating, but after a while it wasn't the kind of thrill I enjoyed.

If it is your time, love will track you down like a cruise missile.If you say "No! I don't want it right now," that's when you'll get it for sure. Love will make a way out of no way. Love is an exploding cigar which we willingly smoke.

Then how can you ever know about the beautiful goodness of Mud? How bad it wants to be things. How bad it wants to get on your legs and arms and take your footprints and handprints and how bad it wants you to make it alive! Mud is always ready to play with you. Seriously you should try it!

In health we're doing the digestive system. We each got assigned a topic for an oral report. I got the small intestine. I swear to god I hate my life.

As I enter the small intestine I get squeezed by muscles. Its dark and the walls look like slimey crushed velvet theres pancreas juice on me help me I am disintigrating.

Sometimes, I think the only art left for us is slowly peeling the label off a beer bottle while somebody tells you about a dream they had.

I found myself compelled - like this weird, shameful compulsion - to draw cute animals.

I am hell with a knife and there is nothing I can really do about it but try and keep my mouth shut and try not to let it show.

Ask a burning question, get a burning answer

Dear Anyone Who Finds This, Do not blame the drugs.

What It Is' was based on this class I've been teaching for 10 years - I wanted to write a book about writing that didn't mention stuff like story structure, protagonists, and all those things that we know about only because they already exist in stories.

The minute you understand racism, you're responsible for being racist. It's like eating from the tree of knowledge.

When an attractive but ALOOF ("cool") man comes along, there are some of us who offer to shine his shoes with our underpants. There are thousands of scientific concepts as to why this is so, and yes, yes, it's very sick but none of this helps.

Race and class are the easiest divisions. It's very stupid

Kids don't plan to play. They don't go: 'Barbie, Ken, you ready to play? It's gonna be a three-act.'

I do dumb stuff, like playing my favorite dumb Barry White song and lip-synching into the mirror so it looks like his voice is coming out of my mouth.

I remember my comic strips being called 'new wave.' It bugged me.

I am about as detailed as a shadow.

I wasn't afraid to be laughed at or be loud.

A man who has been dead for a week in a hot trailer looks more like a man than you would first expect.

Always watch the hands. The hands will tell you everything you need to know.

are memories pictures or the secret doorway?

At the center of everything we call 'the arts,' and children call 'play,' is something which seems somehow alive.

but paper and ink have conjuring abilities of their own. arrangements of lines and shapes, of letters and words on a series of pages make a world we can dwell and travel in.

But when the thing that is scaring you is already Jesus, who are you supposed to pray to?

By the 6th grade I stopped doing ordinary things in front of people. It had been ordinary to sing, kids are singing all the time when they are little, but then something happens. It's not that we stop singing. I still sang. I just made sure I was alone when I did it. And I made sure I never did it accidentally. That thing we call 'bursting into song.' I believe this happens to most of us. We are still singing, but secretly and all alone.

Flies die in so many lonely places. -Roberta Rohbeson

For horror movies, color is reassuring because, at least in older films, it adds to the fakey-ness.

gospel singing ... is the rawest, sweetest, uninhibited and exquisite sounds a person can make or hear. It isn't music, it's an entire experience you feel and live. A sound to rise you up again.

He's picked clean! Eaten by cats!

Humor is such a wonderful thing, helping you realize what a fool you are but how beautiful that is at the same time.

I run a tight ship, but I try and make it seem like I'm not doing that at all.

If I had had me for a student I would have thrown me out of class immediately.

If you can stand to wait 24 hours before you decide the fate of what you have written - either good or bad - you're more likely to see that invisible thing that is invisible for the first few days in any new writing. We just can't know what all is in a sentence until there are several sentences to follow it. Pages of writing need more pages in order to be known, chapters need more chapters.

In life there are always these things happening if you can just get the joke.

It is true that I am a person with black pockets of evil and hatred in my heart. There are underground places inside of me

Love will make a way out of no way

No matter what, expect the unexpected. And whenever possible BE the unexpected.

something can only become an illusion after disillusionment. before that, it is something real. what caused the disillusionment? no one told me the print on the wall was just ink and paper and had no life of its own. at some point the cat stopped blinking, and i stopped thinking it could.

The groove is so mysterious. We're born with it and we lose it and the world seems to split apart before our eyes into stupid and cool. When we get it back, the world unifies around us, and both stupid and cool fall away. I am grateful to those who are keepers of the groove. The babies and the grandmas who hang on to it and help us remember when we forget that any kind of dancing is better than no dancing at all.

The happy ending is hardly important, though we may be glad its there. The real joy is knowing that if you felt the trouble in the story, your kingdom isnt dead.

The histories of vampires and people are not so different, really. How many of us can honestly see our own reflection?

The radio was on and that was the first time I heard that song, the one I hate. Whenever I hear it all I can think of is that very day riding in the front seat with Lucy leaning against me and the smell of Juicy Fruit making me want to throw up. How can a song do that? Be like a net that catches a whole entire day, even a day whose guts you hate? You hear it and all of a sudden everything comes hanging back in front of you, all tangled up in that music.

These are very confusing times. For the first time in history a woman is expected to combine: intelligence with a sharp hairdo, a raised consciousness with high heels, and an open, nonsexist relationship with a tan guy who has a great bod.

This ability to exist in pieces is what some adults call resilience. And I suppose in some way it is a kind of resilience, a horrible resilience that makes adults believe children forget trauma.

What if she stepped on a needle and it went right into her foot and Roberta would not feel it and the needle would rise and rise and rise through the veins leading up to the heart and then the needle would STAB HER IN THE HEART and Roberta would DIE and it would be VERY PAINFUL this according to nurse mother a medical expert on Freaky Ways to Croak... The mother shouted that she knew several people who died from the Rising Stab of the Unfelt Needle or RSUN she has seen cases of it many times and not ONE PERSON HAS SURVIVED IT.

What is an idea made of? Of future, past and also meanwhile.

what is an imaginary friend? are there also imaginary enemies?

What year is it in your imagination?

When we finish a book, why do we hold it in both hands and gaze at it as if it were somehow alive?

When you start to think of the arts as not this thing that is going to get you somewhere in terms of becoming an artist or becoming famous or whatever it is that people do, but rather a way of making being in the world not just bearable, but fascinating, then it starts to get interesting again.

When you think about it, giving up your real personality is a small price to pay for the richness of living happily ever after with an actual man!

You can't know what a book is about until the very end. This is true of a book we're reading or writing.

You have to be willing to spend time making things for no known reason.

You keep seeing your picture on posters that you are missing but you're not. That'd be weird, right? Or say you look down at the sidewalk and earthworms are spelling your name. Or you open a peanut bag and the 'hello' is written in your writing on the inside of the shell. Would that weird ya?

You know that great car-stomach feeling when you fly over a hump? That was my whole body.

You may be a lady but you are still the man!

You'll never call him Fifi again.