"Life is an ambivalent lover. One moment, you are everything and life wants to consume you entirely. The next moment, you are an insignificant speck of nothing. Meaningless."

"It’s something about being in love looking like all the things you’ve lost finding you once more."

"Death is only a doorway."

"(What advice do you have for young artists?) DO: Without hesitation, I would say just be yourself and let your imagination, thoughts, beliefs, views, visions — or whatever inspires you — be seen. Be vulnerable, and share what is inside you. Regardless of what medium you chose to create, open up and share your gift."

"Art was in my blood and my soul, and my grandfather and whole family were encouraging influences. The more I learned, the more I wanted to study and produce art. Picasso was one of my favorite studies."

"It is an artist’s dream/goal to share their work with the world, and I have been blessed in that regard. I have enjoyed creating and sharing it all."

"(You have said that your work is “a celebration of life”...) DO: Having lived 95 years, I see and feel all aspects of life, and believe that it is all to be shared and recounted. It may not sound “right” to “celebrate” a death, but it was just as important to me to recognize loss and turmoil just as I chose to share joy."

"I believe it is just as important to highlight and memorialize all aspects of our world and cultures. To me, it is important not to bury the shame and trauma caused by the issues you ask about."

"Books don’t have a nutritional value. Which is to say, we don’t just read "good" books because they’re good for us. We read to expand our horizons, to understand and connect with something outside ourselves, good and bad. We read to challenge ourselves…"

"Comics allow you to really subtly do those different perspectives without necessarily telling you explicitly what anyone is thinking, just what they’re saying or what they’re doing, which is incredibly valuable I think in storytelling."

"I try to write to the story, as opposed to writing for the reader…"

"Definitely if I am writing something that feels completely straight, I’ll sew some queerness in there, because queerness is always there. It’s like when you’re writing a cityscape, you need to write in the characters that would be there. To me, not doing that is more of a choice."

"Simpson writing website"

"The forms often loop back on themselves... circling around on an idea in order to examine it more fully."

"I became a writer when I began to take it seriously."

"I do this in my long poems. I have to move between one thing and another and this oscillation is the way I find out what I'm trying to say"

"I can look at the world aslant by using an unusual form and thus take hold of an idea in a unique way."

"I find playing with form allows me to play with ideas."

"I find a way to ground myself, literally by using the ground of places near where I live."

"Now that we can do anything, what will we do?"

"Not all cartoon humor is just about having bugged-out eyes and tongues flying out of people's heads."

"Let me make this clear: Ren & Stimpy really is a children's show. It was made for kids. I'm not putting anything in there that I don't think a kid can watch, or should watch. It's completely a kid's show."

"Illustration from the late 1900s up through the middle of the 20th century was absolutely amazing. In general, American culture was at its highest skill-wise in every aspect of human life in the 1940s. It's all been downhill since then. You just open an old magazine from the 1930s and '40s and look at the illustrations in it. There’s nobody alive that could touch the way they could draw back then."

"The main thing missing from cartoons is today that old cartoons were cartoony. They did things you can't do in any other medium. Today's cartoons are very conservative and are more like live action. The characters look the same in every frame of the dang cartoon. The old cartoons squashed, stretched, and did crazy expressions. They were imaginative and crazy. A lot of cartoons aren't imaginative, they just say things. It might as well be radio. There is no point in having anything to look at in modern cartoons. But you can't say that about every cartoon. Genndy Tartakovsky's cartoons are beautiful. The closest thing now to what I'm saying is SpongeBob but even that doesn't go very far. It's like a conservative version of Ren & Stimpy."

"Forget the takes. Takes are cheap shots. Anyone can do a goddamn take. [...] You don't have to be a genius to draw a take. It's emotions—the full range of emotions—that works in Clampett's cartoons."

"The earth grows white with harvest; all day long The sickles gleam, until the darkness weaves Her web of silence o'er the thankful song Of reapers bringing home the golden sheaves. The wave tops whiten on the sea fields drear, And men go forth at haggard dawn to reap; But ever 'mid the gleaners' song we hear The half-hushed sobbing of the hearts that weep."

"Men pass my grave, and say, "'Twere well to sleep, Like such an one, amid the uncaring dead!" How should they know the vigils that I keep, The tears I shed?"

"In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row, That mark our place; and in the sky The larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard amid the guns below.We are the Dead. Short days ago We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved and were loved, and now we lie In Flanders fields.Take up our quarrel with the foe: To you from failing hands we throw The torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields."

"Bid them be patient, and some day, anon, They shall feel earth enwrapt in silence deep; Shall greet, in wonderment, the quiet dawn, And in content may turn them to their sleep."

"That day of battle in the dusty heat We lay and heard the bullets swish and sing Like scythes amid the over-ripened wheat, And we the harvest of their garnering."

"Like restless birds, the breath of coming rain Creeps, lilac-laden, up the village street."

"I take it as a given that God's knowledge of the Cerebus storyline dwarfs my own as God's knowledge of everything dwarfs my own. (#2, p. 9)"

"It seems to me a core element of belief in God that a choice is a choice and it eliminates all other choices."

"If something knocks you five degrees out of whack, the journey of a thousand miles that begins with a single step ends up thousands of miles away from its intended destination."

"Pointing out that there's a turd lying on the carpet is not the same as shitting on the carpet.(p. 75)"

"[A]n attractive lie is always going to be more popular than a hard truth. (No. 11, p. 27)"

"Anything done for the first time unleashes a demon. (Cover and title of Cerebus #65, August 1984, collected in Church & State I, p. 7 and 273)"

"I'd rather take a major financial hit being honest than get rich by lying."

"The greatest mistake you can make is to say that your work is better than a lot of the shit that's out there. No doubt. But being better than shit is not exactly a shining credential. (p. 30)"

"Get out of your own way. (p.28)"

"No companies are ever going to pay you enough money to sue them successfully. (pp. 50-51)"

"...there is very little about self-publishing a comic book that can be taught, but everything about it can be learned. (p. 21)"

"I'd rather live in the gutter embracing reality than live like a king embracing unreality."

"Stop trying to impress some art-school teacher with a stick up his butt whose opinions you never respected from the time you entered his class until you left it 10 years ago. Draw like you. (p. 27)"

"Oscar: In a society where dissenting viewpoints are suppressed, those viewpoints are potent and dangerous... Where dissent is tolerated, it rapidly becomes quaint and is viewed as un-sophisticated; people merely amuse themselves with the expression of contrary opinion. (p. 41)"

"In my experience women are like cats. When you don't want them you can't get rid of them and when you do want them it's like trying to pick up lint with a magnet. (p. 267)"

"Because I say what is empirically true: nothing exists except God, I am deemed to be insane. (ibid, p. 28)"

"The first five years that I did Cerebus I could have made more money baby-sitting (that isn't a joke). Five years. Think about it. (p. 20)"

"If you really want to do it nothing and no one is going to stop you, if you don't really want to do it, nothing and no one is going to help you."

"What the feminists and their ventriloquist puppet husbands are talking about doing with Government-Funded Daycare is raising children as if they were a herd of interchangeable swine. No surprise coming from a gender which has no ethics, no scruples, no sense of right and wrong."