625 Quotes by Bill Watterson

So long, Pop! I'm off to check my tiger trap!

Hobbes got all my better qualities (with a few quirks from our cats), and Calvin my ranting, escapist side. Together, they're pretty much a transcript of my mental diary ... it's pretty startling to reread these strips and see my personality exposed so plainly right there on paper. I meant to disguise that better.

If you have the personalities down, you understand them and identify with them; you can stick them in any situation and have a pretty good idea of how they're going to respond. Then it's just a matter of sanding and polishing up the jokes. But if you've got more ambiguous characters or stock stereotypes, the plastic comes through and they don't work as well. These two characters clicked for me almost immediately and I feel very comfortable working with them.

I say, when life gives you a lemon, wing it right back and add some lemons of your own!

A real job is a job you hate.

I still read newspaper comics, but without much hope for their future.

My problem is that I don't paint ambitiously. It's all catch and release - just tiny fish that aren't really worth the trouble to clean and cook.

Such is American business, I guess, where the desire for obscene profit mutes any discussion of conscience.

Amazingly, much of the best cartoon work was done early on in the medium's history. The early cartoonists, with no path before them, produced work of such sophistication, wit, and beauty that it increasingly seems to me that cartoon evolution is working backward. Comic strips are moving toward a primordial goo rather than away from it . . . Not only can comics be more than we're getting today. but the comics already have been more than we're getting today.