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.

I putter. I nurse old grudges. I fold origami while nursing old grudges. I think about the past. I wonder if there’s any grudges I should start.

I gave up on ever trying to get 'my way.' I barely knew it existed.

My parents were extremely reluctant. When my father was clearly dying, my mother refused to acknowledge it.

I used to love to draw things that made me laugh or made friends laugh. When I was 13 or 14, I started thinking, This is what I like to do more than anything else.

The fact that cartoons are reproduced doesn't mean anything to me as far as whether they are "real art" or not.

Theres something about most phobias where theres a tiny, tiny corner where you think this really actually could happen.

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

I think when you really love something, you notice the minutiae.

Even under the best of circumstances - in twenty-first century America at least - caring for elderly parents ain't no place for sissies.

You could pray all you want that you have a massive stroke while you're working and die, but possibly that won't happen, and you'll be in this bed, and somebody's going to have to clean you up.

Faith is a fortitude.

The secret of being a successful writer is--write. Every writer deserves that chance.

What makes you a man is not the ability to make a child, it's the courage to raise one.

I was wrong about [Jack] Keane. He is the exception that proves the rule. I was certainly right about the fact that he is a member of the warrior class.

As much as "The Lobster" feels like a world we recognize but not the world we live in, it's all drawn in an allegorical way from all the systems that exist.

Sometimes I feel that I am a natural born genius in a field of human endeavor that hasn't been invented yet

What we cannot express by the art of thinking, by the art of science or philosophy or logic, we can and should express by the poetic, visual, or some other arts.

You can’t act Shakespeare until you can speak him.

My views about hell are very traditional.

You could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkling from her eyes; and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and then.