Lynda Barry

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.

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.

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

Love will make a way out of no way.

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.

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.

Humor is such a wonderful thing, helping you realize what a fool you are but how beautiful that is at the same time.

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

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

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.

In life there are always these things happening if you can just get the joke.

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.

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?

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

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

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 used to live a very social life and never spend much solitary time looking at birds or reading.

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

If I didn’t try to eavesdrop on every bus ride I take or look for the humor when I go for a walk, I would just be depressed all the time.

I go to work the minute I open my eyes.

If it is your time, love will track you down like a cruise missile.

There was a beautiful time in the beginning when I just did it and didn’t analyze the consequences, but I think that time ends in everyone’s work.

If I had had me for a student I would have thrown me out of class immediately.

Love is an exploding cigar we willingly smoke.