Bill Watterson Quotes

If you give a little credit to the concept of the artist, I think you ought to indulge excesses a bit, because that reflects the personality of the writer. Now if a joke is in bad taste or it's not funny, okay, that's awhole different thing, but how you craft a joke is really what the writer's job is, and I don't think that technique should be subject to any editorial constraints.

Never argue with a six-year-old who shaves.

The world of a comic strip ought to be a special place with its own logic and life... I don't want the issue of Hobbes's reality settled by a doll manufacturer.

You can present the material, but you can't make me care.

From now on, I'm not doing anything I don't want to do! The world owes me happiness, fulfillment and success... I'm just here to cash in.

Calvin: Today for show and tell, I've brought a tiny miracle of nature: a single snowflake! I think we might all learn a lesson from how this utterly unique and exquisite crystal turns into an ordinary, boring molecule of water just like every other one when you bring it into the classroom. And now, while the analogy sinks in, I will be leaving you drips and going outside.

Often it takes some calamity to make us live in the present. Then suddenly we wake up and see all the mistakes we have made.

I guess I have a gift for expressing pedestrian tastes. In a way, it's kind of depressing.

I let my mind wander and it didn't come back.

At school, new ideas are thrust at you every day. Out in the world, you’ll have to find the inner motivation to search for new ideas on your own. With any luck at all, you’ll never need to take an idea and squeeze a punchline out of it, but as bright, creative people, you’ll be called upon to generate ideas and solutions all your lives. Letting your mind play is the best way to solve problems.

Yeah, but actually, I've got the same questions about God.

Calvin:"It says here that 'religion is the opiate of the masses.'...what do you suppose that means?" Television: "...it means that Karl Marx hadn't seen anything yet

The secret to happiness is short-term, stupid self-interest!

Garry Trudeau is the only cartoonist with the clout to get his strip published large enough to accomodate extended dialogue. It's ashame.

I learned about what I love. Imagination, deep friendship, animals, family, the natural world, ideas and ideals ... and silliness.

Tomorrow we'll not only seize the day, we'll throttle it.

I'm a 21st-century kid trapped in a 19th-century family.

You can draw a penguin on a toilet reading The New York Times and it's adorable, but try doing it with an adult male character, and it's disgusting.

Look! A trickle of water running through some dirt! I'd say our afternoon just got booked solid!

History is the fiction we invent to persuade ourselves that events are knowable and that life has order and direction. That's why events are always reinterpreted when values change. We need new versions of history to allow for our current prejudices.

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?

I'm related to people I don't relate to.

I won't eat any cereal that doesn't turn the milk purple.

If you've ever compared a film to a novel it's based on, you know the novel gets bludgeoned. It's inevitable, because different media have different strengths and needs, and when you make a movie, the movie's needs get served.

I was reading about how countless species are being pushed toward extinction by man's destruction of forests. . . . Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.

I'm pulling out different aspects of my personality in writing each character and, if I'm doing my job well, I'm being true to the situation and true to the character.

Although I'm certainly glad cartoons are finally getting some respect as an art, I'm fairly ambivalent to see cartooning as a legitimate academic offering. If comics need to be deconstructed and explained, something is really wrong with them.

It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.

S...For Stupendous! T...For Tiger, ferocity of! U...For Underwear, Red! P...For Power, Incredible! E...For excellent physique! N...For...Um...Something..Hm, well, I'll come back to that... D...For Determination! U...For...Wait, How do you spell this? Is it "I"??

Isn't it sad how some people's grip on their lives is so precarious that they'll embrace any preposterous delusion rather than face an occasional bleak truth?

Cincinnati at that time was also beginning to realize it had major cartooning talent in Jim Borgman, at the city's other paper, and I didn't benefit from the comparison.His footsteps seemed like good ones to follow, so I cultivated an interest in politics, and Borgman helped me a lot in learning how to construct an editorial cartoon. Neither of us dreamed I'd end up in the same town on the opposite paper.

I guess I just don't have the killer instinct that I think makes a great political cartoonist.

What's the point of wearing your favorite rocket ship underpants if nobody ever asks to see 'em?

I go to school, but I never learn what I want to know.

The truth is, most of us discover where we are headed when we arrive.

What state do you live in? Denial.

I asked mom if I was a gifted child. She said they certainly wouldn't have paid for me.

Rainy days should be spent at home with a cup of tea and a good book.

The whole idea of hobknobbing and schmoozing and the concept of an "elite" class of celebrities better than the common people has always made my stomach turn.

I try to make everyone's day a little more surreal.

It's a cruel season that makes you get ready for bed while it's light out.