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I wasn't afraid to be laughed at or be loud.
Lynda Barry -
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.
Lynda Barry
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Remember when you were in school and the teacher would put a picture under an overhead projector so you could see it on the wall? God, I loved that. Tellya the truth, I used to look at that beam of light and think it was God.
Lynda Barry -
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?
Lynda Barry -
I used to live a very social life and never spend much solitary time looking at birds or reading.
Lynda Barry -
I do love to eavesdrop. It's inspirational, not only for subject matter but for actual dialogue, the way people talk.
Lynda Barry -
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.
Lynda Barry -
I need to be cheered up a lot. I think funny people are people who need to be cheered up.
Lynda Barry
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Race and class are the easiest divisions. It's very stupid.
Lynda Barry -
The strips are nearly effortless unless I am really emotionally upset, a wreck.
Lynda Barry -
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.
Lynda Barry -
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.
Lynda Barry -
Kids don't plan to play. They don't go: 'Barbie, Ken, you ready to play? It's gonna be a three-act.'
Lynda Barry -
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.
Lynda Barry
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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.
Lynda Barry -
Remember how you used to be able to feel your bed breathing and the walls spinning when you were a kid?
Lynda Barry -
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.
Lynda Barry -
The library was open for one hour after school let out. I hid there, looking at art books and reading poetry.
Lynda Barry -
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.
Lynda Barry -
For horror movies, color is reassuring because, at least in older films, it adds to the fakey-ness.
Lynda Barry
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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.
Lynda Barry -
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.
Lynda Barry -
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.
Lynda Barry -
If I had had me for a student I would have thrown me out of class immediately.
Lynda Barry