Bill Griffith

“Frivolity is a stern taskmaster.”

“A full, rich drawing style is a drawback.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Zippy is living in the moment.”

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

“I always thought of Levittown as a joke.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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