Alison Bechdel Quotes

I suppose that a lifetime spent hiding one's erotic truth could have a cumulative renunciatory effect. Sexual shame is in itself a kind of death.

I just have this sort of entrepreneurial spirit and I work really hard at promoting myself.

Was Daedalus really stricken with grief when Icarus fell into the sea? Or just disappointed by the design failure

And partly, the worst thing you could do in my family was need something from someone. So physical strength represented an avenue of self-sufficiency to me.

Even drawing gray hair at all is difficult to render in black and white.

It's a hard thing to age a character because you can't really suddenly give someone gray hair.

If it weren't for the unconventionality of my desires, my mind might never have been forced to reckon with my body.

I'll watch a movie only if it meets the following criteria: 1. It has to have at least two women in it. 2. Who talk to each other. 3. About something besides a man.

It's our very capacity for self-consciousness that makes us self-destructive!

The writing is hard, and the drawing is fun. It's very satisfying to see a drawing start to come together.

I don't know, maybe it's because I was raised Catholic. Confession has always held a great appeal for me.

When I was growing up in the 1960s, there was starting to be more books geared towards young adults.

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

I started to get bored with that stuff about only drawing men and I've taken it out of the slideshow.

It was a vicious cycle, though. The more gratification we found in our own geniuses, the more isolated we grew.

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.

Partly I resented being perceived as weak because I was a girl.

Watching everyone root through their psyche, it just delights me. Especially R. Crumb's stuff.

The satiric ethos of Mad was a much bigger childhood influence.

I grew to resent the way my father treated his furniture like children, and his children like furniture.

Sometimes I wish the writing and drawing were more integrated.

Grief takes many forms, including the absence of grief

For some reason writing and drawing are very separate processes for me.

I wish I had a typical workday. I struggle to get up at seven and almost always fail. I just try to get to my office as soon as I can, but it's always later than I would like.

Who embalms the Undertaker when he dies?

She has given me a way out.

It was not a triumphal return. Home, as I had known it, was gone.

I still found literary criticism to be a suspect activity

I'd been upstaged, demoted from protagonist in my own drama to comic relief in my parents' tragedy

But I read comic books. I read things like Richie Rich and Little Lulu.

Autobiographical comics, I love them. I love them.

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

I never really read superhero stuff as a kid.

I probably read Harriet the Spy about 70,000 times.

I'm pretty illiterate when it comes to comics history.

Mostly it was Mad magazine. And I did read a lot of - I had a subscription when I was little, but I also had access to some old collections, the little paperbacks of the really good stuff.

I tend to write first thing, and then do my drawing later. I like to draw at night. But often I go for long stretches without drawing, because I'm trying to figure out what I'm writing.

I just met someone who read Gone With the Wind 62 times for exactly that same reason. She couldn't bear that it wasn't real. She wanted to live in it.

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

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

If there was ever a bigger pansy than my father, it was Marcel Proust.

Basically, my work is play. It never actually feels that way - I'm always aiming to attain that state. But I get to do for a living what I did as a child for fun, and that's pretty cool.

I get to do for a living what I did as a child for fun, and that's pretty cool.

What would happen if we spoke the truth?

Psychoanalytic insight, Miller seems to suggest, is itself a pathological symptom.

Your unconscious wants to express the pain you feel about your own lost innocence. But your ego wants to keep it repressed. To the compromise is anxiety.

Mom, how come you never go outside?""I told you, I'm a vampire.

How Horrid" has a slightly facetious tone that strikes me as Wildean. It appears to embrace the actual horror--puberty, public disgrace--then at the last second nimbly sidesteps it, laughing.

Grief takes many forms, including the absence of grief.

Don't you kids get any ideas about dragging a trailer into the backyard. after you graduate from high school, i don't want to see you again.