The thing about a cartoon is, you can do whatever you want. The tightrope that we are walking on 'The Simpsons' and 'Futurama' is "How do you continue to surprise the audience, but make them good surprises?" Not every surprise is good, but you want to continue jolting people.

English? Who needs that? I'm never going to England.

The amazing thing about Freak Out! was that there was nothing quite like it in rock 'n roll at the time. It was really simultaneously crude and ugly, and incredibly sophisticated. The Beatles were funny, but there was nothing with the kind of sneer that you could feel in the music of Frank Zappa.

Basically, everything I try to do is to present an alternative to what somebody else is doing.

With "Futurama," I wanted to do unrequited love, and David Cohen agreed, and although our original plan was never to have Fry and Leela get together, we finally just said, "You can only string the fans along so far."

People go into cartooning because they're shy and they're angry. That's when you're sitting in the back of a classroom drawing the teacher.

Lisa: 'Do we have any food that wasn't brutally slaughtered?' Homer: 'Well, I think the veal died of loneliness.'