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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Sometimes I wish the writing and drawing were more integrated.

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

Autobiographical comics, I love them. I love them.

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.

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.

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

I never really read superhero stuff as a kid.

But mostly, it's a book about my relationship with my father.

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.

It's definitely part of it, that the men were having fun and doing the interesting things but also, I don't know, I'm just thinking more about gender and how maybe in some way I am more of a boy than a girl.

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

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 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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

The woman who thinks she is intelligent demands equal rights with men. A woman who is intelligent does not.

If it weren't for women, men would still be wearing last week's socks.

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds. In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours.

Men live by intervals of reason under the sovereignty of humor and passion.

To a smart girl men are no problem - they're the answer.

We should have a State in which we could live and breathe as free men and which we could develop according to our own lights and culture and where principles of Islamic social justice could find free play.

I love children and I love men, but I can't commit to either for the rest of my life.

Athletes as role models and heroes is a hoax, a sick hoax. The men and women who are fighting in Iraq, they are the true heroes.

Prosperous farmers mean more employment, more prosperity for the workers and the business men of every industrial area in the whole country.

It is the privilege of the gods to want nothing, and of godlike men to want little.

There is always a type of man who says he loves his fellow men, and expects to make a living at it.

What the hell difference does it make, left or right? There were good men lost on both sides.

Art: If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.

Lives of great men oft remind us as we o'er their pages turn, That we too may leave behind us - Letters that we ought to burn.