Stephan Pastis Quotes

We need more cartoonists to truly retire when they retire, and not run repeats.

If you're from a certain generation, you basically learn to read with 'Peanuts.' It's sort of the template for the modern strip. Its influence ceased to be noticed because it's in everything.

It's best to love your family as you would a Siberian tiger-from a distance, preferably separated by bars.

I'm very harsh on real estate agents. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because of how the call every small house 'charming' and every run-down house a 'great fixer-upper'. Just once, I'd like them to show me a house and declare, 'This one's a piece of crap'.

Most poetry just confounds me. I really want to like it, but I can't help thinking it's a hoax. (p. 24)

My wife Staci made me go to a wedding last weekend...If it weren’t for her, I’d be happy.

When I say 'friends,' I use that term loosely, as I don't actually have any.

If a restaurant offers crayons, I always take them and color throughout the meal. It beats talking to the people I came to dinner with.

I seem to be able to get away with pun strips if I add a panel at the end where I somehow indicate that I know it's a bad pun.

Sticking to my schedule, Ive gotten over seven months ahead, which allowed me to write a Pearls Before Swine movie script for the big screen.

Whenever I see people with their collars up, I'm tempted to point it out to them like you would for someone who has a food stain on their shirt or food in their teeth, as if to say, 'Your fashion sense is so offensive I'm assuming it's some sort of accident you'll want to fix.

Basically, I learned to read by reading 'Peanuts,' just wanting to know what they were saying.

I was a lawyer for 10 years, and when youre in law, things really have to get done, or somebody sues you. Its a great trick.

Brits have a better sense of humor in most ways. It's darker, more cutting.

When you can't draw chameleons and you can't draw blenders, it's a bad idea to write strips where chameleons become blenders.

If somebody is not on the same page with me humor wise, I can't give them that.

I don't like drawing characters facing right. If I tried to do that at a book signing, I'd have to pencil it first.

Repeats are the absolute soul-crushing killers of the comics page.

You can write a little and can draw a little, but there's necessarily a limitation on both in a comic strip, since it appears in such a tiny space.

The writing is done on the computer, and the drawing is done by hand. I write, write, write, then I hit the illustration.

A stand-up comedian faces the audiences and gets their immediate feedback. I hide behind the comic strip, and unless people write to me, I dont know what they think.

The phrase 'I just turn on my monkey and it makes me feel good' sounds very dirty, but I can't explain why. It's great to try to use expressions like that on the comics page. People want to complain but they can't, because they can't figure out quite what they should be complaining about.

When I was at the University of California at Berkeley, I went to some classes that must have had more than four hundred students in them. I almost always sat in the far back of the auditorium so I could read the newspaper. I remember that I stayed late one day to ask the professor a question, and when I got up to him, all I could think to myself was, 'So this is what the professor looks like.

If you put me in South Park, that audience is going to fall asleep in five minutes.

I recently forced myself to read a book on quantum physics, just to try and learn something new. I was confused by the middle of the first sentence and it all went downhill from there. The only thing I can remember learning is that a parallel universe can theoretically be contained on the head of a needle. I don't really know what that means, but I am now more careful handling needles.