Lynda Barry Quotes

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

The strips are nearly effortless unless I am really emotionally upset, a wreck.

Love is an exploding cigar we willingly smoke.

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

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.

I am not sure how much I would like being married if I wasn't married to him. A man who likes flea markets and isn't gay? I knew I was lucky.

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.

If it is your time, love will track you down like a cruise missile.If you say "No! I don't want it right now," that's when you'll get it for sure. Love will make a way out of no way. Love is an exploding cigar which we willingly smoke.

No matter what, expect the unexpected. And whenever possible BE the unexpected.

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.

When you start to think of the arts as not this thing that is going to get you somewhere in terms of becoming an artist or becoming famous or whatever it is that people do, but rather a way of making being in the world not just bearable, but fascinating, then it starts to get interesting again.

are memories pictures or the secret doorway?

What year is it in your imagination?

You have to be willing to spend time making things for no known reason.

At the center of everything we call 'the arts,' and children call 'play,' is something which seems somehow alive.

I live in constant fear of being fired or dropped for that dark part of my work I can't control.

When an attractive but ALOOF ("cool") man comes along, there are some of us who offer to shine his shoes with our underpants. There are thousands of scientific concepts as to why this is so, and yes, yes, it's very sick but none of this helps.

In life there are always these things happening if you can just get the joke.

The groove is so mysterious. We're born with it and we lose it and the world seems to split apart before our eyes into stupid and cool. When we get it back, the world unifies around us, and both stupid and cool fall away. I am grateful to those who are keepers of the groove. The babies and the grandmas who hang on to it and help us remember when we forget that any kind of dancing is better than no dancing at all.

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

Playing and fun are not the same thing, though when we grow up we may forget that and find ourselves mixing up playing with happiness. There can be a kind of amnesia about the seriousness of playing, especially when we played by ourselves.

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

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.

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

Always watch the hands. The hands will tell you everything you need to know.

When we finish a book, why do we hold it in both hands and gaze at it as if it were somehow alive?

You keep seeing your picture on posters that you are missing but you're not. That'd be weird, right? Or say you look down at the sidewalk and earthworms are spelling your name. Or you open a peanut bag and the 'hello' is written in your writing on the inside of the shell. Would that weird ya?

Then how can you ever know about the beautiful goodness of Mud? How bad it wants to be things. How bad it wants to get on your legs and arms and take your footprints and handprints and how bad it wants you to make it alive! Mud is always ready to play with you. Seriously you should try it!

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.

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?

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

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

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

If I had had me for a student I would have thrown me out of class immediately.

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.

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.

But when the thing that is scaring you is already Jesus, who are you supposed to pray to?

The point of the daily diary exercise is not to record what you already know about what happened to you in the last 24 hours. Instead, it’s an invitation to the back of your mind to come forward and reveal to you the perishable images about the day you didn’t notice you noticed at all.

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.

something can only become an illusion after disillusionment. before that, it is something real. what caused the disillusionment? no one told me the print on the wall was just ink and paper and had no life of its own. at some point the cat stopped blinking, and i stopped thinking it could.

Love will make a way out of no way

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.

If you can stand to wait 24 hours before you decide the fate of what you have written - either good or bad - you're more likely to see that invisible thing that is invisible for the first few days in any new writing. We just can't know what all is in a sentence until there are several sentences to follow it. Pages of writing need more pages in order to be known, chapters need more chapters.

I go to work the minute I open my eyes.

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.

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.