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

In a narcissistic cathexis, you invest more energy into your ideas about another person than in the actual, objective, external person. So the man who falls in love with beauty is quite different from the man who loves a girl and feels she is beautiful and can see what is beautiful about her.

The secret subversive goal of my work is to show that women, not just lesbians, are regular human beings.

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.

People really want to think that these things really happened. I don't know why that is important, but I know that when I finish reading a novel or something, I want to know how much of that really happened to this author.

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.

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

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.

My father once nearly came to blows with a female dinner guest about whether a particular patch of embroidery was fuchsia or magenta. But the infinite gradations of color in a fine sunset - from salmon to canary to midnight blue - left him wordless.

It certainly was an important moment for me, that realization that I was not going to get what I wanted. It was very freeing. I keep using that word "freeing" or "liberating." I feel like Houdini sometimes, like I'm just getting out of one set of shackles after another, hanging upside down inside a burlap bag with handcuffs on. Hopefully one day, I'm going to get out of this tank of water.

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.

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

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

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

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

Nancy Drew was always changing her outfits. I despised girls' clothing, I couldn't wait to get home from school and get out of it. The last thing I wanted to read was minute descriptions of Nancy's frocks.

Sometimes I wish the writing and drawing were more integrated.

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.

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

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

Grief takes many forms, including the absence of grief

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

I’m glad mainstream culture is starting to catch up to where lesbian-feminism was 30 years ago.

Bechdel Test, was named for the comic strip it came from, penned by Alison Bechdel - but Bechdel credits a friend named Liz Wallace, so maybe it really should be called the Liz Wallace Test...? Anyway, the test is much simpler than the name. To pass it your movie must have the following: a) there are at least two named female characters, who b) talk to each other about c) something other than a man.

I'm not that good of a drawer. I don't know how people just draw stuff out of their head. I'm always creating schemes. If I have to draw someone sitting in a chair, I have to go find a chair, sit in it, and take a picture of myself sitting in it.

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.

What would happen if we spoke the truth?

Who embalms the Undertaker when he dies?

Although I am good at enumerating my father’s flaws, it’s hard for me to sustain much anger at him. I expect this is partly because he’s dead, and partly because the bar is lower for fathers than it is for mothers.

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

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.

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

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

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

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'm pretty illiterate when it comes to comics history.

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

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

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

I still found literary criticism to be a suspect activity

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

It's imprecise and insufficient, defining the homosexual as a person whose gender expression is at odds with his or her sex.

Self-published media are really critical. It's so heartwarming that people are still doing it in this digital age. It's just really moving and exciting. You can't really replace a beautiful little mini-comic. It doesn't translate to the computer, you know? Handmade stuff has really given me hope for humanity.