Alison Bechdel Quotes

Yeah, I read Judy Blume. My mother didn't like that, but I read it anyhow.

I get to do for a living what I did as a child for fun, and that's pretty cool.

I don't know how anyone gets anything done in New York City. I vastly prefer living in the country. I just need a lot of quiet and solitude, and I'm so easily distracted. I mean, the Internet is enough to deal with.

If it weren't for the unconventionality of my desires, my mind might never have been forced to reckon with my body.

It's imprecise and insufficient, defining the homosexual as a person whose gender expression is at odds with his or her sex.

What would happen if we spoke the truth?

You can't live and write at the same time.

Bechdel Test, was named for the comic strip it came from, penned by Alison Bechdel - but Bechdel credits a friend named Liz Wallace, so maybe it really should be called the Liz Wallace Test...? Anyway, the test is much simpler than the name. To pass it your movie must have the following: a) there are at least two named female characters, who b) talk to each other about c) something other than a man.

Basically, my work is play. It never actually feels that way - I'm always aiming to attain that state. But I get to do for a living what I did as a child for fun, and that's pretty cool.

I tend to write first thing, and then do my drawing later. I like to draw at night. But often I go for long stretches without drawing, because I'm trying to figure out what I'm writing.

Nancy Drew was always changing her outfits. I despised girls' clothing, I couldn't wait to get home from school and get out of it. The last thing I wanted to read was minute descriptions of Nancy's frocks.

I wish I had a typical workday. I struggle to get up at seven and almost always fail. I just try to get to my office as soon as I can, but it's always later than I would like.

But I read comic books. I read things like Richie Rich and Little Lulu.

Watching everyone root through their psyche, it just delights me. Especially R. Crumb's stuff.

I do sometimes miss doing that lighter, more humorous work, and I find there's a heavier responsibility that goes along with a literary reputation. You have to start knowing what you're talking about and you have to go have public conversations with writers. That's been pretty intense; I have to really stay on top of things in a way I didn't before.

Mostly it was Mad magazine. And I did read a lot of - I had a subscription when I was little, but I also had access to some old collections, the little paperbacks of the really good stuff.

Self-published media are really critical. It's so heartwarming that people are still doing it in this digital age. It's just really moving and exciting. You can't really replace a beautiful little mini-comic. It doesn't translate to the computer, you know? Handmade stuff has really given me hope for humanity.

My father once nearly came to blows with a female dinner guest about whether a particular patch of embroidery was fuchsia or magenta. But the infinite gradations of color in a fine sunset - from salmon to canary to midnight blue - left him wordless.

I try not to have anything too much going on between waking up and getting to work. I like to just be really fresh when I sit down. I always have my best ideas, like, within five minutes of starting. And then the rest of the day is just kind of putting in time.

I started to get bored with that stuff about only drawing men and I've taken it out of the slideshow.

I probably read Harriet the Spy about 70,000 times.

For some reason writing and drawing are very separate processes for me.

And partly, the worst thing you could do in my family was need something from someone. So physical strength represented an avenue of self-sufficiency to me.

Who embalms the Undertaker when he dies?

She has given me a way out.

I don't know, maybe it's because I was raised Catholic. Confession has always held a great appeal for me.

I suppose that a lifetime spent hiding one's erotic truth could have a cumulative renunciatory effect. Sexual shame is in itself a kind of death.

I never really read superhero stuff as a kid.

Sometimes I wish the writing and drawing were more integrated.

I could not do what I do if I were not obsessive compulsive to a certain extent. I don't act clinically OCD. I'm not going to check things so many times I have to take drugs for it. But the kind of complicated and painstaking work I have to do to make my drawings, it just kind of harnesses that compulsive energy in a constructive way.

I love Jules Feiffer. I didn't discover him until I was a little older.

Grief takes many forms, including the absence of grief

In a narcissistic cathexis, you invest more energy into your ideas about another person than in the actual, objective, external person. So the man who falls in love with beauty is quite different from the man who loves a girl and feels she is beautiful and can see what is beautiful about her.

Although I am good at enumerating my father’s flaws, it’s hard for me to sustain much anger at him. I expect this is partly because he’s dead, and partly because the bar is lower for fathers than it is for mothers.

It's our very capacity for self-consciousness that makes us self-destructive!

At first I was glad for the help. My freshmen English class, "Mythology and Archetypal Experience," confounded me. I didn't understand why we couldn't just read books without forcing contorted interpretations on then

The web is my unconscious but it's also a wish -- a fantasy of what my own creativity might look like if I weren't constantly impeding its flow.

If there was ever a bigger pansy than my father, it was Marcel Proust.

I still found literary criticism to be a suspect activity

Even drawing gray hair at all is difficult to render in black and white.

Partly I resented being perceived as weak because I was a girl.

Was Daedalus really stricken with grief when Icarus fell into the sea? Or just disappointed by the design failure

It certainly was an important moment for me, that realization that I was not going to get what I wanted. It was very freeing. I keep using that word "freeing" or "liberating." I feel like Houdini sometimes, like I'm just getting out of one set of shackles after another, hanging upside down inside a burlap bag with handcuffs on. Hopefully one day, I'm going to get out of this tank of water.

The secret subversive goal of my work is to show that women, not just lesbians, are regular human beings.

I'm not that good of a drawer. I don't know how people just draw stuff out of their head. I'm always creating schemes. If I have to draw someone sitting in a chair, I have to go find a chair, sit in it, and take a picture of myself sitting in it.

When I was growing up in the 1960s, there was starting to be more books geared towards young adults.

Well, I'm always working on my comic strip and trying to, you know, keep cranking that out.

I just have this sort of entrepreneurial spirit and I work really hard at promoting myself.