Top 30 Roz Chast Quotes

I think I have a habit of, in my head, taking notes on whatever, you know, whether they’re verbal or pictorial or just making a note of things as they’re happening.

I don’t like cartoons that take place in Nowhereville. I like cartoons where I know where they’re happening.

I don’t put myself through that nauseating experience of looking at someone’s face while they go through your stuff. Ugh! It’s just horrible! It gives me the cringes to even think about it.

The wonderful thing about the cartoon form is it’s a combination of words and pictures. You don’t have to choose, and the contribution of the two often winds up being greater than the sum of its parts.

My parents were very, very close; they pretty much grew up together. They were born in 1912. They were each other’s only boyfriend and girlfriend. They were – to use a contemporary term I hate – co-dependent, and they had me very late. So they had their way of doing things, and they reinforced each other.

Sometimes, you know – I think, with a lot of things, at the time, everything is extremely upsetting, and then you look back on it, and it actually can be sort of funny.

I don’t like anything that looks gelatinous – really weirds me out. But when I was a kid, I used to get very, very upset if anything had a kind of chalky texture; like, certain kinds of cottage cheese I know have a weird chalkiness.

It’s like a ‘chicken or the egg’ thing. We’re all part of the culture. We’re reflecting it; we’re changing it. So, yeah, I think culture is always changing.

I have an African gray parrot; her name is Eli. We thought she was a boy. And a blue-streaked lory named Marco. He’s 10. And a yellow and green parakeet, Petey. He’s very cute, but he’s getting old.

Sunday, there’s not a lot of structure. I might spend an hour thinking about why I don’t exercise, and feeling very guilty about not exercising. I tried running, over 10 years ago. It didn’t really take.

I just really love the cartoon form. I love the plasticity of it.

I don’t think any of my kids’ books talk down to kids.

I like being able to go grocery shopping and not feel that I’m fighting a thousand people.

My life is so boring that your brains are going to melt and come out of your eyes.

I can’t even look at daily comic strips. And I hate sitcoms because they don’t seem like real people to me: they’re props that often say horrible things to each other, which I don’t find funny. I have to feel like they’re real people.

I sometimes suffer from insomnia. And when I can’t fall asleep, I play what I call the alphabet game.

I love my parents. I did love them. It’s complicated.

My works were not – and they still aren’t – single panel gags with a punch line underneath them. I like a lot of those cartoons; I just don’t draw them.

I don’t like holidays. And I don’t like crowds of people. I don’t like noise.

I don’t like going into the basement. I’m always afraid that something’s going to blow up.

It was deeply interesting to observe my mother closely and to draw her. During those last months, she wasn’t speaking much, if at all, and it was a way for me to be with her. It felt very natural.

I used to think of the cartoons as a magazine within a magazine. First you go through and read all the cartoons, and then you go back and read the articles.

I had to get good grades and do well in school – my mother was an assistant principal and my father was a teacher – and they took this very seriously.

My kids always joked that I spent more time cooking the birds’ food than I have cooking for them. And it’s probably true.

One way of paying tribute to my parents was ‘bearing witness’ as the Quakers do – writing down everything that was happening instead of turning my back on it and pretending that it was all great.

I think when your parents die, it is kind of like a moving sidewalk: you’re not just on the sideline and watching them go by. You know, you’re going to the same place they are.

For me, drawing was an outlet. No one in school said, ‘Oh, she can do sports,’ or, ‘She’s pretty,’ but I could draw.

I think that children’s books should be censored not for references to sex but for references to diseases. I mean, who didn’t think after reading ‘Madeline’ that they were going to get appendicitis?

I’m sure that my parents’ behavior has entered my work, I’m sorry to say. I don’t think you need to have a difficult childhood to be funny, but it helps.

I think, with my cartoons, the parent-like figures are kind of my own archeypes of parents, and they’re taken a little bit from my parents and other people’s parents, and parents I have read about, and parents I dreamed about, and parents that I made up.