Quotes by Bill Griffith

• Their scrambled attention spans struck me as a metaphor for the way we get our doses of reality these days.
• I went to an art school in Brooklyn and painted Fine Art, if that's what you'd call it for eight years in New York, until I saw the first underground comics in the East Village Other.
• Jazz, rock and roll, movies and comics are the culture of America.
• Looking back Little Lulu was an early feminist, but at the time I just thought she was a really feisty developed comic strip character.
• Mike Judge, who I've become friends with over the years never took himself seriously as an artist.
• My first character was Mr. Toad.
• A full, rich drawing style is a drawback.
• The down side of Americans being obsessed with pop culture is that they kind of like it light.
• Comics is a language. It's a language most people understand intuitively.
• Then I abandoned comics for fine art because I had some romantic vision of being like Vincent Van Gogh Jr.
• Unfortunately what came out of it was also kind of an imitation community with a lot of mindless conformity.
• Well, I've done a lot of strips since I've been here about Zippy and me being in Connecticut.
• When drugs came around I sampled them just like anybody else but I never became dependent creatively on drugs; like various cartoonists in the underground never did anything if they weren't stoned, That was the prerequisite for sitting down and drawing.
• Yes, but personally I was never a big acid head.
• Zippy accepts chaos as what it is, which is the real order of everything.
• She encouraged any artistic impulse I had, and my father discouraged any artistic impulse I had. They took out their problems with each other on me and my sister.
• I had a mixture, my father was a career army man and my mother was a writer.
• Are we having fun yet?
• All life is a blur of Republicans and meat.
• I think Zippy is part of me, but I'm not Zippy.
• Everyone says how Calvin and Hobbes is about a real kid, to me there's nothing real about it; it's an adult using a kid's body as a mouthpiece.
• Frivolity is a stern taskmaster.
• If something is going on in my life, it winds up getting into my strip.
• I guess if you take yourself seriously as an artist there starts either the problem or the beauty of doing good artwork.
• But now with technology I could sit down and do a bunch of character drawings and scan them into a computer, and the computer using my exact style could bring it into life, where it would have been edited by various human beings before.
• I had a very diametrically opposite set of parents.
• When I was an art student in the early 60's before the acid scene began I was smoking pot just like anyone else who was an artist.
• I just became one with my browser software.
• Zippy is living in the moment.
• Everybody that loves Nancy loves it in a slightly condescending way. Nancy is comics reduced to their most elemental level.
• I always thought of Levittown as a joke.
• What I do is draw but if you make an animated feature obviously it takes a whole team of people, and Zippy is my work. I felt that turning it over to a team of people would be wrong.