Garry Trudeau Quotes
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I can only try to keep the characters interesting; it's up to the readers to decide whether they're still relevant.
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Satire is a form of social control, it's what you do. It's not personal. It's a job.
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In their heyday, comics were a dominant force in popular culture, but that's over.
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I think it's very dangerous for people who do anything that's public to venture on the Web and check out what people are saying about them. Yes, you're bound to find things that will delight you - but you also find things that will make you brood and feel bad about yourself. Why would you intentionally invite that into your life?
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I've been getting pulled from newspapers for my entire career.
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I try not to second-guess editors; they're the clients, and I have no expectation that my strip is going to make it into every paper every day.
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Coming up with ideas is really hard - they don't spontaneously pop into my head while I'm cutting vegetables.
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I've never taken any issue off the table for lack of suitability. Only for lack of imagination.
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In any event, it's not exactly a secret to regular readers what my views on the war are.
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When you're young, with less on the line, it's easier to be audacious, to experiment. So I introduced the concerns of my generation - politics, sex, drugs, rock-and-roll, etc. - to the comics page, which for many years caused a rolling furor.
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Humor can inform and break down stigma, which is a huge issue in the military.
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Well, it's a humor strip, so my first responsibility has always been to entertain the reader... But if, in addition, I can help move readers to thought and judgment about issues that concern me, so much the better.
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Comic-strip artists generally have very modest ambitions. Day to day, we labor to fit together all these little moving parts - a character or two, a few lines of dialogue, framing, pacing, payoff - but we certainly don't think of them adding up over time to some larger portrait of our times.
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When you're young, you don't feel iconoclastic - you're just kind of doing what seems natural, what moves you.
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For the most part, editors no longer view 'Doonesbury' as a rolling provocation, which is fine by me. It makes no sense to intentionally antagonize the very people on whose support you most depend.
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I don't think so, but it's always in the back of my mind that many of the soldiers being wounded and killed in Iraq are about the same age as my kids. My godson is going over soon, so the war's about to get personal for me.
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Whether you think we belong in Iraq or not, we can't tune it out; we have to remain mindful of the terrible losses that individual soldiers are suffering in our name.