Lynda Barry Quotes
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I am about as detailed as a shadow.
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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.
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I wasn't afraid to be laughed at or be loud.
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I grew up in a house that had a whole lot of trouble. As much trouble as you could imagine.
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I do love to eavesdrop. It's inspirational, not only for subject matter but for actual dialogue, the way people talk.
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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.
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I need to be cheered up a lot. I think funny people are people who need to be cheered up.
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The strips are nearly effortless unless I am really emotionally upset, a wreck.
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Kids don't plan to play. They don't go: 'Barbie, Ken, you ready to play? It's gonna be a three-act.'
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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?
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The thing that really struck me when I went to junior high was class. I grew up on a pretty poor street, but the school district I was in included some fine neighborhoods - so I got to know a couple of the kids from those places and went to their houses and experienced such culture shock.
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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.
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Race and class are the easiest divisions. It's very stupid.
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People think that whatever I put into strips has happened to me in my life.
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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.
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For horror movies, color is reassuring because, at least in older films, it adds to the fakey-ness.
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When you learn about stories in school, you get it backward. You start to think 'Oh, the reason these things are in stories is because a book said I need to put these things in there.' You need a death, as my husband says, and you need a little sidekick with a saying like 'Skivel-dee-doo!'
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My strips are not always funny, and they can be pretty grim at times, and I know I lose readers because of it, but I can't do anything about it - my work is very much connected to something I need to do in order to feel stable.
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Humor is such a wonderful thing, helping you realize what a fool you are but how beautiful that is at the same time.
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Remember how you used to be able to feel your bed breathing and the walls spinning when you were a kid?
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Part of a horror movie has to be a bit fakey for me to really enjoy it. The new ones are so realistic that they distract me from the ride through the horror.
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No one stopped me from playing when I was alone, but there were times when I wasn't able to, though I wanted to... There were times when nothing played back. Writers call it 'writer's block.' For kids there are other names for that feeling, though kids don't usually know them.
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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.
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The library was open for one hour after school let out. I hid there, looking at art books and reading poetry.