Top 40 Lynda Barry Quotes

I look crazy. I know I do. Been true since I was a kid!

I used to live a very social life and never spend much solitary time looking at birds or reading.

I wasn’t afraid to be laughed at or be loud.

I found myself compelled – like this weird, shameful compulsion – to draw cute animals.

The thing that really struck me when I went to junior high was class. I grew up on a pretty poor street, but the school district I was in included some fine neighborhoods – so I got to know a couple of the kids from those places and went to their houses and experienced such culture shock.

I think of images as an immune system and a transit system.

Love is an exploding cigar we willingly smoke.

Race and class are the easiest divisions. It’s very stupid.

It’s one thing to have a relationship, to lay your hands on it, and another to make it continue and last. That’s something I haven’t talked about much in my comic strips, and it’s certainly something I’m interested in.

If it is your time, love will track you down like a cruise missile.

The happy ending is hardly important, though we may be glad it’s there. The real joy is knowing that if you felt the trouble in the story, your kingdom isn’t dead.

For horror movies, color is reassuring because, at least in older films, it adds to the fakey-ness.

Remember how you used to be able to feel your bed breathing and the walls spinning when you were a kid?

We don’t create a fantasy world to escape reality. We create it to be able to stay.

I was unable to sleep and I would stay up and draw these little cartoons. Then a friend showed them around. Before I knew it I was a cartoonist.

‘What It Is’ was based on this class I’ve been teaching for 10 years – I wanted to write a book about writing that didn’t mention stuff like story structure, protagonists, and all those things that we know about only because they already exist in stories.

When you learn about stories in school, you get it backward. You start to think ‘Oh, the reason these things are in stories is because a book said I need to put these things in there.’ You need a death, as my husband says, and you need a little sidekick with a saying like ‘Skivel-dee-doo!’

I need to be cheered up a lot. I think funny people are people who need to be cheered up.

It’s much easier to teach writing, because people are less shy about writing. If they’re in a group, nobody can see what they’re writing. When you’re drawing, people get a little more nervous.

It’s not hard for me to be funny in front of people, but most of that is just horrified nerves taking the form of what makes people laugh, and afterwards I’d always feel dreadfully depressed, kind of self-induced bi-polar disorder.

I grew up in a house that had a whole lot of trouble. As much trouble as you could imagine.

The minute you understand racism, you’re responsible for being racist. It’s like eating from the tree of knowledge.

‘Good Times’ is a story about the loss of innocence, how adults are responsible for their actions but children aren’t.

I do love to eavesdrop. It’s inspirational, not only for subject matter but for actual dialogue, the way people talk.

I run a tight ship, but I try and make it seem like I’m not doing that at all.

No one stopped me from playing when I was alone, but there were times when I wasn’t able to, though I wanted to… There were times when nothing played back. Writers call it ‘writer’s block.’ For kids there are other names for that feeling, though kids don’t usually know them.

Kids don’t plan to play. They don’t go: ‘Barbie, Ken, you ready to play? It’s gonna be a three-act.’

I tried to be like the richer kids as much as I could because I wanted to live on their streets, at least hang out on their streets and eat their amazing food and walk barefoot on their shag carpets. I became something of a pest in that way, and in general, other people’s parents didn’t like me.

People think that whatever I put into strips has happened to me in my life.

Sometimes I think I’m the craziest person on the planet.

I listen like mad to any conversation taking place next to me just trying to hear why this is funny. Women’s restrooms are especially great. I wash my hands twice waiting for people to come in and start talking.

Remember when you were in school and the teacher would put a picture under an overhead projector so you could see it on the wall? God, I loved that. Tellya the truth, I used to look at that beam of light and think it was God.

Going on Letterman is like going off the high dive. It’s exhilarating, but after a while it wasn’t the kind of thrill I enjoyed.

I started doing cartoons when I was about 21. I never thought I would be a cartoonist. It happened behind my back. I was always a painter and drawer.

Humor is such a wonderful thing, helping you realize what a fool you are but how beautiful that is at the same time.

When I work on a book, I usually start with a question. And I don’t sit around and go ‘I need to write a book. What’s a good question?’ It will be a question that’s just clanging around in my head. So for ‘What It Is,’ it was this idea of ‘What is an image?’

There was a beautiful time in the beginning when I just did it and didn’t analyze the consequences, but I think that time ends in everyone’s work.

I remember my comic strips being called ‘new wave.’ It bugged me.

When I was working on ‘Freddie,’ I had been trying to write it on a computer for many, many years, but that delete button just won’t let anything go forward.

Part of a horror movie has to be a bit fakey for me to really enjoy it. The new ones are so realistic that they distract me from the ride through the horror.