Lynda Barry Quotes

You may be a lady but you are still the man!

In health we're doing the digestive system. We each got assigned a topic for an oral report. I got the small intestine. I swear to god I hate my life.

Then how can you ever know about the beautiful goodness of Mud? How bad it wants to be things. How bad it wants to get on your legs and arms and take your footprints and handprints and how bad it wants you to make it alive! Mud is always ready to play with you. Seriously you should try it!

You know that great car-stomach feeling when you fly over a hump? That was my whole body.

I think of images as an immune system and a transit system.

The happy ending is hardly important, though we may be glad its there. The real joy is knowing that if you felt the trouble in the story, your kingdom isnt dead.

This ability to exist in pieces is what some adults call resilience. And I suppose in some way it is a kind of resilience, a horrible resilience that makes adults believe children forget trauma.

The radio was on and that was the first time I heard that song, the one I hate. Whenever I hear it all I can think of is that very day riding in the front seat with Lucy leaning against me and the smell of Juicy Fruit making me want to throw up. How can a song do that? Be like a net that catches a whole entire day, even a day whose guts you hate? You hear it and all of a sudden everything comes hanging back in front of you, all tangled up in that music.

We don't create a fantasy world to escape reality. We create it to be able to stay.

You can't know what a book is about until the very end. This is true of a book we're reading or writing.

I go to work the minute I open my eyes.

These are very confusing times. For the first time in history a woman is expected to combine: intelligence with a sharp hairdo, a raised consciousness with high heels, and an open, nonsexist relationship with a tan guy who has a great bod.

As I enter the small intestine I get squeezed by muscles. Its dark and the walls look like slimey crushed velvet theres pancreas juice on me help me I am disintigrating.

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?

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.

I need to be cheered up a lot. I think funny people are people who need to be cheered up.

You have to be willing to spend time making things for no known reason.

If you can stand to wait 24 hours before you decide the fate of what you have written - either good or bad - you're more likely to see that invisible thing that is invisible for the first few days in any new writing. We just can't know what all is in a sentence until there are several sentences to follow it. Pages of writing need more pages in order to be known, chapters need more chapters.

Humor is such a wonderful thing, helping you realize what a fool you are but how beautiful that is at the same time.

People think that whatever I put into strips has happened to me in my life.

At the center of everything we call 'the arts,' and children call 'play,' is something which seems somehow alive.

Going on Letterman is like going off the high dive. It's exhilarating, but after a while it wasn't the kind of thrill I enjoyed.

When an attractive but ALOOF ("cool") man comes along, there are some of us who offer to shine his shoes with our underpants. There are thousands of scientific concepts as to why this is so, and yes, yes, it's very sick but none of this helps.

If I had had me for a student I would have thrown me out of class immediately.

The library was open for one hour after school let out. I hid there, looking at art books and reading poetry.

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.

The groove is so mysterious. We're born with it and we lose it and the world seems to split apart before our eyes into stupid and cool. When we get it back, the world unifies around us, and both stupid and cool fall away. I am grateful to those who are keepers of the groove. The babies and the grandmas who hang on to it and help us remember when we forget that any kind of dancing is better than no dancing at all.

I run a tight ship, but I try and make it seem like I'm not doing that at all.

If it is your time, love will track you down like a cruise missile.If you say "No! I don't want it right now," that's when you'll get it for sure. Love will make a way out of no way. Love is an exploding cigar which we willingly smoke.

I live in constant fear of being fired or dropped for that dark part of my work I can't control.

When we finish a book, why do we hold it in both hands and gaze at it as if it were somehow alive?

I wasn't afraid to be laughed at or be loud.

I grew up in a house that had a whole lot of trouble. As much trouble as you could imagine.

We don’t create a fantasy world to escape reality, we create it to be able to stay. I believe we have always done this, used images to stand and understand what otherwise would be intolerable.

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.

gospel singing ... is the rawest, sweetest, uninhibited and exquisite sounds a person can make or hear. It isn't music, it's an entire experience you feel and live. A sound to rise you up again.

I am not sure how much I would like being married if I wasn't married to him. A man who likes flea markets and isn't gay? I knew I was lucky.

A man who has been dead for a week in a hot trailer looks more like a man than you would first expect.

I used to live a very social life and never spend much solitary time looking at birds or reading.

Race and class are the easiest divisions. It's very stupid

If I didn't try to eavesdrop on every bus ride I take or look for the humor when I go for a walk, I would just be depressed all the time.

The minute you understand racism, you're responsible for being racist. It's like eating from the tree of knowledge.

You keep seeing your picture on posters that you are missing but you're not. That'd be weird, right? Or say you look down at the sidewalk and earthworms are spelling your name. Or you open a peanut bag and the 'hello' is written in your writing on the inside of the shell. Would that weird ya?

I started doing cartoons when I was about 21. I never thought I would be a cartoonist. It happened behind my back. I was always a painter and drawer.

The only reason we find structure in stories is because it's there naturally in human interaction, and in the way that people tell stories.

are memories pictures or the secret doorway?

I look crazy. I know I do. Been true since I was a kid!

but paper and ink have conjuring abilities of their own. arrangements of lines and shapes, of letters and words on a series of pages make a world we can dwell and travel in.