My first character was Mr. Toad.

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.

In this watering-place I acted an heroic character, badly studied; and being a novice on such a stage, I forgot my part before a pair of lovely blue eyes.

I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation.

But even with a character like Cary who is relatively outlandish, at the end of the movie he's in a place where I wouldn't have expected him to be - taking on the responsibility of a woman who is pregnant and who used to be his best friend's wife.

Always, your work is the same: You have to tell a story, you have to make a character. It doesn't matter if there are thousands of dollars, millions behind it, or if there is nothing.

Each of us is meant to have a character all our own, to be what no other can exactly be, and do what no other can exactly do.

I liked Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, and that is the kind of character that I would like to have played. That would have been more in tune with who I really was.

It's the difficulty we had with Mr. Bean, actually, when it went from TV to film. You certainly discover that you need to explain more about a character.

In a lot of ways, the make-up was the character.

The more we study the Indian's character the more we appreciate the marked distinction between the civilized being and the real savage.

So many people have said that to me, that what they really like about Alex is what she brings out in Marissa, and what this situation brings out in her, a hint of happiness and another side to her character.

I've been on the show for six years and I don't even know what her history is. I sort of make things up in my mind, but I think it's hard for an audience to follow and invest in a character when they don't have the details.

It is not true that drink changes a man's character. It may reveal it more clearly.

Because I killed a guy in real life, and because my character kills a guy onstage, they said I could never do anything this great again. I resented that.

Well, I go to the theater today, and its curtain - there is no curtain in this play; the lights go down and go up - and we start. And I live this character for two hours. There are only two of us in the play. And It's a complete experience.

I just kind of understood it, and I threw my love for others and love for life into the character, and was having a blast. I loved playing Dharma. I loved it!