123 Quotes by Alison Bechdel

Yeah, I read Judy Blume. My mother didn’t like that, but I read it anyhow.

Well, I’m always working on my comic strip and trying to, you know, keep cranking that out.

I love Jules Feiffer. I didn’t discover him until I was a little older.

The web is my unconscious but it’s also a wish – a fantasy of what my own creativity might look like if I weren’t constantly impeding its flow.

I still found literary criticism to be a suspect activity.

You can’t live and write at the same time.

Maybe it was the converse of the way amputees feel pain in a missing limb. He really was there all those years, a flesh-and-blood presence streaming off the wallpaper, digging up the dogwoods, polishing the finials... smelling of sawdust and sweat and designer cologne. But I ached as if he were already gone.

At first I was glad for the help. My freshmen English class, “Mythology and Archetypal Experience,” confounded me. I didn’t understand why we couldn’t just read books without forcing contorted interpretations on then.

Gatsby’s self-willed metamorphosis from farm boy to prince is many ways identical to my father’s. Like Gatsby, my father fueled this transformation with the “colossal vitality of his illusion”. Unlike Gatsby he did this on a school teacher’s salary.