Lynda Barry Quotes

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.

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

I believe a kid who is playing is not alone. There is something brought alive during play, and this something, when played with, seems to play back.

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

[Lynda's mother] You're stupid and you don't know it, that's you're problem. You talk, talk, talk, all the time. No one wants to listen to an idiot.

[Young Lynda] Uh. OK. Thanks, Mom.

I kept trying to find a way to turn myself so that I couldn't see the telephone poles or be in the path of father's breath. I was feeling dizzy and then very sick and the father was shouting, 'WHAT THE
GO TO THE HEAD, DO IT IN THE HEAD! DON'T PUKE ON ME, CLYDE! CLYDE!'
I never did finish my letter to Jesus. I tried for a while but I couldn't think of anything else to say besides, Have a Good Summer and Stay Crazy.

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.

[Chucky] Ya peanut headed suckerfool!
Take me on!
Ya ugly knuckle butted dogface underpants!
You think I'm playin'?

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.

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

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

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

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

Love is an exploding cigar we willingly smoke.

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

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

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.

My mom didn't want me to go to college. She didn't want me to read - when I read, I may as well have been holding a pineapple.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

He's picked clean! Eaten by cats!

Once i knew the blinking cat could not really blink, was just paper and ink.

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.

I go to work the minute I open my eyes.

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.

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

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

Are memories pictures or the secret doorway?

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Same circus, different clowns, and without a doubt I'm one of them.

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?

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

When I work on a book, I usually start with a question. And I don't sit around and go 'I need to write a book. What's a good question?' It will be a question that's just clanging around in my head. So for 'What It Is,' it was this idea of 'What is an image?'

Ask a burning question, get a burning answer

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.

My childhood is always going to limit me.

One by one most kids I knew quit drawing and never drew again. It left behind too much evidence.

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

The cool thing about being a middle-aged woman is that they asked me if I wanted the security guard inside of the room or outside of the room, and I said, "Outside." And the guard said, "You'll be locked in, there'll be no way for you to get out." And I turned around and there was 21 guys looking at me. There's something about being a middle-aged woman that just totally… I can rock the Auntie Lynda or grandma thing now. [Impersonating an old woman] "Now, you sit down! I don't care about those tattoos! You just sit down." [Laughter.]

I really loved it. These are the people that I would venture to say probably went to public schools, probably went to difficult public schools, and now they're in prison. Their ability to focus and write these stories was amazing; I mean their stories are.… I think the same thing that can get somebody in prison is the same thing that could make them a really good writer. Impulse control. There's no, "Is this a bad convenience store to rob?" [Laughter.] "Is this a bad sentence?

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.

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.

'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.

Above me soft footsteps, the sound through the ceiling of a teenager haunted by a door to the night. My cousin Maybonne lights up a Salem, blows ghosts to the darkness, be it ever so humble, there's no place like home.

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

I always start my class with a coloring assignment using crayons to color three pages from a variety of coloring pages pinned to the wall. Pick 3. Color them densely, trying to get as much of the crayon on the paper as possible. Students find it frustrating because crayons are surprisingly hard to work with, but they usually have some fun doing it. Until...when the finished pages were pinned to the wall, all of the pages were colored just the way I assigned - but all the joy was gone. Something went wrong.

What was it?

This: I told them to color hard in order to do it right. And go straight to using force - thinking I was showing them a short-cut - - this took away the way of coloring they would have found on their own. By telling them just how to do it, I took the playing-around away, the gradual figuring out that brings something alive to this activity, makes it worth-while, and is transferable to other activities.

I realize now the best results came when I gave no instructions except, "spend time on this assignment." That was 3 years ago. Why did it take me so long to figure this out?

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.

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.

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

Dear Blubbo, How is it going? It is fine here. My sisters are fine. Mom is usual. Everything is regular in life except I am still seeing the burning skull heads. Yesterday Mom took me to Sears for school clothes. I told my sisters I could see the people's head bones. They said DO NOT tell Mom. A guy moved a trailer onto the empty lot by our house. His skull is spectacular, many colors glowing.

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 thing I call 'my mind' seems to be kind of like a landlord that doesn't really know its tenants.

Whenever I do a book, I'm usually guided by a question or something that I'm trying to tease out.

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.

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.

Like say if the mom and dad of god said he could never get dirty. There would be no world!

What year is it in your imagination?

Some lights shine without any flashing. Others flash on and off.

Flies die in so many lonely places. -Roberta Rohbeson

I believe [images] are the soul's immune system and transit system.

The future is fixed.
The past ever-changing

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

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.

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.

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

When you are little, you will draw pictures for no reason.

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

Non-photo blue pencils...

After about a week of using them the class is smitten.

It looks like thinking, this color of blue.

Like words before you say them.

No, she answered, one is of tin, and one of straw; one is a girl and another a Lion. None of them is fit to work, so you may tear them into small pieces.

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.

What is it? The ordinary is EXTRAORDINARY. The ordinary is extraordinary. The ordinary is the thing we want back when someone we love dies. When someone dies or leaves or falls out of love with us. We call it "little things". We say, "it's the little things I miss most." The ordinary things. It's the little thing that brings them back to us unexpectedly. We say "reminds us" but it is more than reminding-it's a conflagration-it's an inundation-Both fire and flood is memory. It's spark and breach so ordinary we do not question it. The atom split. The little thing.