Bill Griffith Quotes (50 Quotes)

Frivolity is a stern taskmaster.

Zippy accepts chaos as what it is, which is the real order of everything.

At this point it's kind of a faded, tattered dream, but over the years there was some serious effort and a lot of serious money spent to make a movie.

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.

Everybody that loves Nancy loves it in a slightly condescending way. Nancy is comics reduced to their most elemental level.

I grew up on Long Island, and my wife and I had always talked about coming back East some day and living in the country.

Sometimes when people read Zippy they're expecting it to fall into the same formula as some other comics. That's not what I do.

A lot of people write angry letters saying Zippy is stupid and that's why they don't get it because it is stupid.

I hate Calvin and Hobbes. I think its a big re-hash of formula kid strips.

Then I abandoned comics for fine art because I had some romantic vision of being like Vincent Van Gogh Jr.

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.

I think Zippy is part of me, but I'm not Zippy.

The down side of Americans being obsessed with pop culture is that they kind of like it light.

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.

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.

Unfortunately what came out of it was also kind of an imitation community with a lot of mindless conformity.

Jazz, rock and roll, movies and comics are the culture of America.

If something is going on in my life, it winds up getting into my strip.

Zippy is living in the moment. He's at peace with himself because he's out of step with everyone he doesn't know it, and he doesn't care.

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.

Are we having fun yet?

He's starting to learn defenses and starting to learn how to read defenses. He's more confident standing in the pocket and taking his time making a decision.

My first character was Mr. Toad.

I guess if you take yourself seriously as an artist there starts either the problem or the beauty of doing good artwork.

At this point, it's just kind of a long tradition to help with this auction and help Adele out. I've been there as long as its been going. It was a fast 20 years. I would do anything she asked me to do.

Looking back Little Lulu was an early feminist, but at the time I just thought she was a really feisty developed comic strip character.

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.

I had a very diametrically opposite set of parents.

All life is a blur of Republicans and meat.

I had a mixture, my father was a career army man and my mother was a writer.

Zippy is living in the moment.

I always thought of Levittown as a joke.

Zippy has no problem with the irrationality of the universe, whereas most of us are desperately trying to make order out of the universe, and our lives.

His observations are almost an obsession. He's very neurotic, full of self-doubt, which he masquerades as being critical of everything.

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.

MTV won't do anything unless they own it 100 so that didn't tempt me at all because I would never give away the character.

What we're seeing out of this area recruiting-wise are Division II kids, ... We don't have the biggest kids here.

I'm trying to shine a light on things that are recognizable in all of us, that Zippy embodies, that once we admit to, maybe we can laugh at.

It's time to get serious.

Yes, but personally I was never a big acid head.

Well, I've done a lot of strips since I've been here about Zippy and me being in Connecticut.

When the Zippy movie first started being talked about very rarely would people actually say animation to me, because I would never consider it.

Cartooning has come a long way. It started out as an adult medium, for satirical purposes then the appeal to children got emphasized.

I just became one with my browser software.

A full, rich drawing style is a drawback.

In making my strips the inspiration is really only the germ of something, they say it's 99 perspiration, 1 inspiration.

I've known Crumb for twenty-five years and no movie could affect my opinion of him.

Their scrambled attention spans struck me as a metaphor for the way we get our doses of reality these days.

Comics is a language. It's a language most people understand intuitively.

Mike Judge, who I've become friends with over the years never took himself seriously as an artist.