Bill Watterson Quotes (108 Quotes)

I liked things better when I didn't understand them.

I know the world isn't fair, but why isn't it ever unfair in my favor?

I'm not dumb. I just have a command of thoroughly useless information.

Mothers are the necessity of invention.

Heck, what's a little extortion among friends?

Experience is food for the brain.

Why waste time learning, when ignorance is instantaneous?

If cartoonists would look at this more as an art than as a part time job or a get-rich-quick scheme, I think comics overall would be better. I think there's a tremendous potential to be tapped.

Childhood is short and maturity is forever.

Weekends don't count unless you spend them doing something completely pointless.

. . . it's worth recognizing that there is no such thing as an overnight success. You will do well to cultivate the resources in yourself that bring you happiness outside of success or failure. The truth is, most of us discover where we are headed when we arrive. At that time, we turn around and say, yes, this is obviously where I was going all along. It's a good idea to try to enjoy the scenery on the detours, because you'll probably take a few.

It's surprising how hard we'll work when the work is done just for ourselves.

I've got to start listening to those quiet, nagging doubts.

Hobbes got all my better qualities (with a few quirks from our cats), and Calvin my ranting, escapist side. Together, they're pretty much a transcript of my mental diary ... it's pretty startling to reread these strips and see my personality exposed so pl

The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure pure reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!

We all have different desires and needs, but if we don't discover what we want from ourselves and what we stand for, we will live passively and unfulfilled.

It took hundreds of years for these woods to grow, and they leveled it in a week. It's gone. After they build new houses here, they'll have to widen the roads and put up gas stations, and pretty soon the whole area will just be a big strip. Eventually there won't be a nice spot left anywhere. I wonder if you can refuse to inherit the world.

Letting your mind play is the best way to solve problems.

The kind of girl I was attracted to in school and eventually married.

A real job is a job you hate.

The whole pleasure for me is having the opportunity to do a comic strip for a living, and now that I've finally got that I'm not going to give it away. . . . Any time somebody else has their hand in the ink it's changing the product, and I enjoy the responsibility for this product. I'm willing to take the blame if the strip goes down the drain, and I want the credit if it succeeds. So long as it has my name on it, I want it to be mine.

I used to make original snowmen, but it was time consuming, hard work. So I said, heck, this is crazy Now I crank out crude imitations of what's already popular It takes no time or thought, and most people don't care about the difference, anyway And what good is originality if you can't crank it out

It's not denial. I'm just selective about the reality I accept.

I'm yet another resource-consuming kid in an overpopulated planet, raised to an alarming extent by Hollywood and Madison Avenue, poised with my cynical and alienated peers to take over the world when you're old and weak.

Talking with you is sort of the conversational equivalent of an out of body experience.

I think we dream so we don't have to be apart so long. If we're in each other's dreams, we can play together all night.

Hobbes might be a little closer to me in terms of personality, with Calvin being more energetic, brash, always looking for life on the edge. He lives entirely in the present, and whatever he can do to make that moment more exciting he'll just let fly . . . and I'm really not like that at all.

The more you think about things, the weirder they seem. Take this milk. Why do we drink cow milk Who was the guy who first looked at a cow and said, I think I'll drink whatever comes out of these things when I squeeze 'em - Calvin and Hobbes

People who get nostalgic about childhood were obviously never children.

If something is so complicated that you can't explain it in 10 minutes, than it's probably not worth knowing anyways.

The syndicates take the strip and sell it to newspapers and split the income with the cartoonists. Syndicates are essentially agents. Now, can you imagine a novelist giving his literary agent the ownership of his characters and all reprint, television, and movie rights before the agent takes the manuscript to a publisher Obviously, an author would have to be a raving lunatic to agree to such a deal, but virtually every cartoonist does exactly that when a syndicate demands ownership before agreeing to sell the strip to newspapers.

So, what's it like in the real world? Well, the food is better, but beyond that, I don't recommend it.

We all want to go to heaven, but nobody wants to do what it takes to get there.

True, comics are a popular art, and yes, I believe their primary obligation is to entertain, but comics can go beyond that, and when they do, they move from silliness to significance.

When birds burp, it must taste like bugs.

We've had a few, but considering the length of the delay, it has not been bad.

Genius is never understood in its own time.

If life is just a stage, then we are all running around ad-libbing, with absolutely no clue what the plot is. Maybe that's why we don't know whether it's a comedy or tragedy.

I suppose if we couldn't laugh at things that don't make sense, we couldn't react to a lot of life.

There is not enough time to do all the nothing we want to do.

After today, I'll bet Santa takes a shovel to the reindeer stalls to fill your stocking.

A little rudeness and disrespect can elevate a meaningless interaction to a battle of wills and add drama to an otherwise dull day.

If someone wants to be a cartoonist, let's see him develop his own strip instead of taking over the duties of someone else's. We've got too many comic strip corpses being propped up and passed for living by new cartoonists who ought to be doing something of their own. If a cartoonist isn't good enough to make it on his own work, he has no business being in the newspaper.

Getting an inch of snow is like winning 10 cents in the lottery.

The world of a comic strip ought to be a special place with its own logic and life... I don't want the issue of Hobbes's reality settled by a doll manufacturer.

I have a hammer I can put things together I can knock things apart I can alter my environment at will and make an incredible din all the while Ah, it's great to be male

I didn't want 'Calvin and Hobbes' to coast into halfhearted repetition, as so many long-running strips do. I was ready to pursue different artistic challenges, work at a less frantic pace ... and start restoring some balance to my life.

Know what's weird? Day by day, nothing seems to change. But pretty soon, everything's different.

That's the whole problem with science. You've got a bunch of empiricists trying to describe things of unimaginable wonder.

Reality continues to ruin my life.