Mike Judge, who I've become friends with over the years never took himself seriously as an artist.

Zippy accepts chaos as what it is, which is the real order of everything.

Comics is a language. It's a language most people understand intuitively.

The down side of Americans being obsessed with pop culture is that they kind of like it light.

I hate Calvin and Hobbes. I think its a big re-hash of formula kid strips.

Well, I've done a lot of strips since I've been here about Zippy and me being in Connecticut.

Unfortunately what came out of it was also kind of an imitation community with a lot of mindless conformity.

Yes, but personally I was never a big acid head.

Are we having fun yet?

Everybody that loves Nancy loves it in a slightly condescending way. Nancy is comics reduced to their most elemental level.

When drugs came around I sampled them just like anybody else but I never became dependent creatively on drugs; like various cartoonists in the underground never did anything if they weren't stoned, That was the prerequisite for sitting down and drawing.

What I do is draw but if you make an animated feature obviously it takes a whole team of people, and Zippy is my work. I felt that turning it over to a team of people would be wrong.

If something is going on in my life, it winds up getting into my strip.

When I was an art student in the early 60's before the acid scene began I was smoking pot just like anyone else who was an artist.

A full, rich drawing style is a drawback.

Zippy is living in the moment.

Their scrambled attention spans struck me as a metaphor for the way we get our doses of reality these days.

I always thought of Levittown as a joke.

I went to an art school in Brooklyn and painted Fine Art, if that's what you'd call it for eight years in New York, until I saw the first underground comics in the East Village Other.

My first character was Mr. Toad.

I had a very diametrically opposite set of parents.

Jazz, rock and roll, movies and comics are the culture of America.

I guess if you take yourself seriously as an artist there starts either the problem or the beauty of doing good artwork.

Mike Judge, who I've become friends with over the years never took himself seriously as an artist.

Looking back Little Lulu was an early feminist, but at the time I just thought she was a really feisty developed comic strip character.

I just became one with my browser software.

All life is a blur of Republicans and meat.

I had a mixture, my father was a career army man and my mother was a writer.

Everyone says how Calvin and Hobbes is about a real kid, to me there's nothing real about it; it's an adult using a kid's body as a mouthpiece.

I think Zippy is part of me, but I'm not Zippy.

Frivolity is a stern taskmaster.

But now with technology I could sit down and do a bunch of character drawings and scan them into a computer, and the computer using my exact style could bring it into life, where it would have been edited by various human beings before.

Then I abandoned comics for fine art because I had some romantic vision of being like Vincent Van Gogh Jr.

She encouraged any artistic impulse I had, and my father discouraged any artistic impulse I had. They took out their problems with each other on me and my sister.

Being a cover artist is not like being a real artist. That's just copying what someone else did.

The artist need not know very much; best of all let him work instinctively and paint as naturally as he breathes or walks.

What an artist learns matters little. What he himself discovers has a real worth for him, and gives him the necessary incitement to work.

Beauty, like truth, is relative to the time when one lives and to the individual who can grasp it. The expression of beauty is in direct ratio to the power of conception the artist has acquired.

I'm inspired by nature. Other artist's work is important for developing my perception.

There is only one position for an artist anywhere; and that is upright.

The difference between a bad artist and a good one is: the bad artist seems to copy a great deal; the good one really does.

To say that an artist sells out means that an artist is making a conscious choice to compromise his music, to to weaken his music for the sake of commercial gain.

What do you say when someone has truly inspired you? How do you express to an artist how deeply their work has affected you?

An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.

When I say artist I mean the man who is building things - creating molding the earth - whether it be the plains of the west - or the iron ore of Penn. It's all a big game of construction - some with a brush - some with a shovel - some choose a pen.

You have to find what makes you stable in the storm. Then, no matter what's happening round you, no matter what the hype or the publicity, you can still manage to make leaps in your work as an artist.

The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another... and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world.

I've always felt that if one was going to take seriously this vocation as an artist, you have to get beyond that decorative facade.

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.