Berkeley Breathed Quotes
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The comic page is dying; I didn't want to go with it.
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I could draw Bloom County with my nose and pay my cleaning lady to write it, and I'd bet I wouldn't lose 10% of my papers over the next twenty years. Such is the nature of comic-strips. Once established, their half-life is usually more than nuclear waste.
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My kids hear me behind my door, giggling like an idiot, and they roll their eyes at the blatant indignity of it all.
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I was never asked to join the Editorial Cartoonists Of America. No fraternity would have me in college, either. I think they know something.
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Irony can elude the genius among us, sometimes.
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I don't get fan mail. It disappeared with the digital revolution.
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If I could have drawn a cat yelling for lasagna every day for 15 years and have them pay me $30 million to do so, I would have.
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I grew up in Los Angeles and always wished I'd spent a childhood in a far different place.
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I drew the last image ever of Opus at midnight while Puccini was playing and I got rather stupid. Thirty years. A bit like saying goodbye to a child - which is ironic because I was never, never sentimental about him as many of his fans were.
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Cartooning is about deconstruction: you gotta tear something down to make a joke.
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The cartooning was always just an abstraction. It was an income. It was making me famous. It was allowing me to go and do other things that I'd wanted to do.
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Negative humor is forgotten immediately. It's the stuff that makes us feel better about our lives that lives long. Much more satisfying. Enter children's books.
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That's the conundrum of cartoon stripping, as opposed to political cartoons. When your anger is the driving force of your drawing hand, failure follows. The anger is OK, but it has to serve the interests of the heart, frankly.
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I'll confess right here that I secretly wish I'd have drawn a strip about a little boy with a fake tiger, going for adventures throughout the universe in spaceships of his imagination.
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The digital world has allowed me a connection with my reader that I'd never had before. I didn't meet the people who read my material. The fan letters were mostly answered by professional people that'd done them for a living. And I didn't have any daily connection with their response to my work. I didn't have a relationship with my audience. And every artist should have it.
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Dear Lord, I've been asked, nay commanded, to thank Thee for the Christmas turkey before us... a turkey which was no doubt a lively, intelligent bird... a social being... capable of actual affection... nuzzling its young with almost human- like compassion. Anyway, it's dead and we're gonna eat it. Please give our respects to its family.
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And just as it is with all proper grannies, she ordered me into my pink bunny jammies.
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Such is the nature of comic strips. Once established, their half-life is usually more than nuclear waste. Typically, the end result is lazy, rich cartoonists.
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I ignore Hallmark Holidays. And this comes from a guy who has sold a million Opus greeting cards.
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It's not terribly dignified to have anyone seeing one laugh at one's own material.
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Despite what they tell you, there are simply no moral absolutes in a complex world.
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I knew 'Mars Needs Moms! ' would be a movie seconds after the title came to mind. Similarly, I also knew that my daughter would be calling me a dork as a default term of endearment eventually.
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Keep in mind that in 1985, I had a potential readership of over 50 million Americans. At that time, a good portion of those were under 30.
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I can say that even in the midst of my most cynical comic stripping: Opus shone through with a bit of heart, anchoring the ugly proceedings with a comforting pull of emotion.