Lynda Barry Quotes
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.
If I didn't try to eavesdrop on every bus ride I take or look for the humor when I go for a walk, I would just be depressed all the time.
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.
Sometimes, I think the only art left for us is slowly peeling the label off a beer bottle while somebody tells you about a dream they had.
You have to be willing to spend time making things for no known reason.
I live in constant fear of being fired or dropped for that dark part of my work I can't control.
At the center of everything we call 'the arts,' and children call 'play,' is something which seems somehow alive.
Humor is such a wonderful thing, helping you realize what a fool you are but how beautiful that is at the same time.
Remember how you used to be able to feel your bed breathing and the walls spinning when you were a kid?
As I enter the small intestine I get squeezed by muscles. Its dark and the walls look like slimey crushed velvet theres pancreas juice on me help me I am disintigrating.
I do love to eavesdrop. It's inspirational, not only for subject matter but for actual dialogue, the way people talk.
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.
Cartoonist was the weirdest name I finally let myself have. I would never say it. When I heard it I silently thought, what an awful word.
The thing I call ‘my mind’ seems to be kind of like a landlord that doesn’t really know its tenants.
I do dumb stuff, like playing my favorite dumb Barry White song and lip-synching into the mirror so it looks like his voice is coming out of my mouth.
But when the thing that is scaring you is already Jesus, who are you supposed to pray to?
I used to live a very social life and never spend much solitary time looking at birds or reading.
I need to be cheered up a lot. I think funny people are people who need to be cheered up.
I've gotten a lot of livid letters about the awfulness of my work. I've never known what to make of it. Why do people bother to write if they hate what I do?
When we finish a book, why do we hold it in both hands and gaze at it as if it were somehow alive?
The only reason we find structure in stories is because it's there naturally in human interaction, and in the way that people tell stories.
We don’t create a fantasy world to escape reality, we create it to be able to stay. I believe we have always done this, used images to stand and understand what otherwise would be intolerable.
In health we're doing the digestive system. We each got assigned a topic for an oral report. I got the small intestine. I swear to god I hate my life.
A man who has been dead for a week in a hot trailer looks more like a man than you would first expect.
The library was open for one hour after school let out. I hid there, looking at art books and reading poetry.
The minute you understand racism, you're responsible for being racist. It's like eating from the tree of knowledge.
It is true that I am a person with black pockets of evil and hatred in my heart. There are underground places inside of me
When you think about it, giving up your real personality is a small price to pay for the richness of living happily ever after with an actual man!
gospel singing ... is the rawest, sweetest, uninhibited and exquisite sounds a person can make or hear. It isn't music, it's an entire experience you feel and live. A sound to rise you up again.
