Quotes by Alison Bechdel

• Partly I resented being perceived as weak because I was a girl.
• One of them is already having some menopausal symptoms. I'm working on that. I'm giving them all little lines under the eyes, trying to sort of make them age gracefully.
• 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.
• My mother is, my father certainly was. They were kind of the local intelligentsia in the town where I grew up.
• People really want to think that these things really happened. I don't know why that 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.
• It's definitely part of it, that the men were having fun and doing the interesting things but also, I don't know, I'm just thinking more about gender and how maybe in some way I am more of a boy than a girl.
• 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.
• Sometimes I wish the writing and drawing were more integrated.
• That's all true, but there was something else going on for me as a kid, something about my gender identity that I haven't figured out yet. And that's one of the things I'm hoping to dissect and investigate in this memoir project.
• The satiric ethos of Mad was a much bigger childhood influence.
• It's a hard thing to age a character because you can't really suddenly give someone gray hair.
• When I grew up, I studied karate for years. I got pretty strong, but eventually I had to acknowledge that I really didn't like fighting at all, so I quit.
• Well, I'm always working on my comic strip and trying to, you know, keep cranking that out.
• Writing this book feels like a completely different activity from writing my comic strip because it's about real life. I feel like I'm using a part of my brain that's been dormant until now.
• Yeah, I read Judy Blume. My mother didn't like that, but I read it anyhow.
• Watching everyone root through their psyche, it just delights me. Especially R. Crumb's stuff.
• Even drawing gray hair at all is difficult to render in black and white.
• When I was growing up in the 1960s, there was starting to be more books geared towards young adults.
• 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.
• Autobiographical comics, I love them. I love them.
• I'm pretty illiterate when it comes to comics history.
• But mostly, it's a book about my relationship with my father.
• For some reason writing and drawing are very separate processes for me.
• I don't know, maybe it's because I was raised Catholic. Confession has always held a great appeal for me.
• I probably read Harriet the Spy about 70,000 times.
• I hope that I can get people to read it without having to change it. Especially now that the strip has more different kinds of characters. It's really not all lesbians any more.
• I just have this sort of entrepreneurial spirit and I work really hard at promoting myself.
• 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.
• I love Jules Feiffer. I didn't discover him until I was a little older.
• I never really read superhero stuff as a kid.
• I get a lot of mail from men who really identify with Stuart, you know, Sparrow's boyfriend. I love that. Even though I used to say I wanted men to read the strip even though there weren't any men in it, so they'd be forced to identify with the women.
• I started to get bored with that stuff about only drawing men and I've taken it out of the slideshow.
• But I read comic books. I read things like Richie Rich and Little Lulu.