Gary Larson Quotes

Thunderstick? ... You actually said, 'Thunderstick?' ... That, my friend is a Winchester 30.06.

Hot oil! We need hot oil! ... Forget the water balloons!

Wait a minute! This is grass! We've been eating grass!

The daily calendar seemed, to me, like a kind of cartoon black hole, and you didn't have to be a rocket scientist to know that that couldn't be sustained indefinitely. That's why I pulled the plug on that one after the '02 edition. Kind of a preemptive strike.

This was more than just a cow - this was an entire career I was looking at.

The great thing about this jungle of ours is that anyone of you could grow up to be Lord of the apes.

If a tree falls in the woods, and nobody is around to hear it, and it hits a mime, does anyone care?

My drafting table, where I drew The Far Side for most of my career, faced a window that overlooked a beautiful garden; beyond the garden was a lake, and beyond the lake Mount Rainier rose majestically into the Washington sky.

I worked at night.

My future plans are hazy, and I've yet to experience how much cartooning is in my blood and therefore how much I'll miss it. But I have some other interests, especially in music, and I will probably take the opportunity to delve into those things more deeply.

A long time ago, I became aware that many of us have a tendency to lump nature into simplistic categories, such as what we consider beautiful or ugly, important or unimportant. As human a thing as that is to do, I think it often leads us to misunderstand the respective roles of life forms and their interconnectedness.

I never liked my own species.

Charters give public school teachers the flexibility to design programs to the individual student needs. They no longer have to go to a distant bureaucracy to ask for permission. By being allowed to make their own decisions the teachers are able to create strong partnerships with parents.

You know those little snow globes that you shake up? I always thought my brain was sort of like that. You know, where you just give it a shake and watch what comes out and shake it again. It's like that.

The Bluebird of Happiness long absent from his life, Ned is visited by the Chicken of Depression.

You always hear a headline like this, 'Man Killed By Shark', you never hear it from the other perspective, 'Man Swims in Shark Infested Waters, Forgets He's Shark Food'.

It is a known fact that the sheep that give us steel wool have no natural enemies.

Look out, everyone! ... We're being attacked by a giant sq ... well, no ... I'd say medium squid!

Things can be low on the food chain, but that doesn't mean they're lowly ...

I keep thinking someone's gonna show up and say, 'There's been a big mistake. The guy next door is supposed to be drawing the cartoon. Here's your shovel.'

The picture's pretty bleak, gentlemen ... The world's climates are changing, the mammals are taking over, and we all have a brain about the size of a walnut.

On Career Day in high school, you don't walk around looking for the cartoon guy.

The message is not so much that the worms will inherit the Earth, but that all things play a role in nature, even the lowly worm.

He has been known by many names: Lucifer, Beelzabub, Belial, the Prince of Lies, Satan, and at a party once an obnoxious drunk kept calling him "Dude."

I never liked my own species. On why so many of his comics are about animals, in an interview.

I've always considered music stores to be the graveyards of musicians.

I actually find a lot of parallels in jazz and cartooning.

People try to look for deep meanings in my work. I want to say, 'They're just cartoons, folks. You laugh or you don't.' Gee, I sound shallow. But I don't react to current events or other stimuli. I don't read or watch TV to get ideas. My work is basically sitting down at the drawing table and getting silly.

I just get silly inside my head and I start to think about something and in my head I start twisting it around, contorting it and envisioning it in different ways.

Theme-park approach to nature. We judge plants and animals by whether they're entertaining to us. We gravitate toward animals and plants that are big, dramatic, beautiful and at eye-level.

I don't believe in the concept of hell, but if I did I would think of it as filled with people who were cruel to animals.