Calvin: Trick or treat! Adult: Where's your costume? What are you supposed to be? Calvin: I'm yet another resource-consuming kid in an overpopulated planet, raised to an alarming extent by Madison Avenue and Hollywood, poised with my cynical and alienated peers to take over the world when you're old and weak... Am I scary, or what?

In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive.

It's not the medium, but the quality of perception and expression, that determines the significance of art.

Ms. Wormwood: Calvin, can you tell us what Lewis and Clark did? Calvin: No, but I can recite the secret superhero origin of each member of Captain Napalm's Thermonuclear League of Liberty. Ms. Wormwood: See me after class, Calvin. Calvin: [retrospectively] I'm not dumb. I just have a command of thoroughly useless information.

Mom and Dad say I should make my life an example of the principles I believe in... But every time I do, they tell me to stop it.

I thought my life would seem more interesting with a musical score and a laugh track.

I chose to tell the story visually, so that anyone of any age, from any country, could understand it.