Gary Larson

“The need for an office sort of crept up on me.”

“I never have been able to understand where the humor comes from.”

“I just get silly inside my head and I start to think about something and in my head I start twisting it around, contorting it and envisioning it in different ways.”

“Great moments in science: Einstein discovers that time is actually money.”

“I keep thinking someone's gonna show up and say, 'There's been a big mistake. The guy next door is supposed to be drawing the cartoon. Here's your shovel.'”

“As for the reasons behind my retirement, they mostly center around simple fatigue and a fear that if I continue for many more years my work will begin to suffer, or at the very least ease into the graveyard of mediocre cartoons.”

“I was so intrigued by insects and things that crawled or flew - I could spend hours by myself in a vacant lot.”

“The Bluebird of Happiness long absent from his life, Ned is visited by the Chicken of Depression.”

“Don Martin was the one who really stood out. I really always loved his work. He was such a great artist.”

“My future plans are hazy, and I've yet to experience how much cartooning is in my blood and therefore how much I'll miss it. But I have some other interests, especially in music, and I will probably take the opportunity to delve into those things more deeply.”

“Taking a solo on a tune is always a little bit scary.”

“The daily calendar seemed, to me, like a kind of cartoon black hole, and you didn't have to be a rocket scientist to know that that couldn't be sustained indefinitely. That's why I pulled the plug on that one after the '02 edition. Kind of a preemptive strike.”

“People try to look for deep meanings in my work. I want to say, 'They're just cartoons, folks. You laugh or you don't.' Gee, I sound shallow. But I don't react to current events or other stimuli. I don't read or watch TV to get ideas. My work is basically sitting down at the drawing table and getting silly.”

“With my own cartoon, it was just me being goofy by myself, but when it comes to an animated film, you're working with 45 animators and assistant animators. It's a whole different ballgame.”

“My first month in syndication, I made about $100. I thought it would be exciting if I ever got up to the level where I could pay my rent.”

“I didn't feel that my identity was caught up in being a cartoonist, and that if it stopped I'd stop.”

“Every week when my batch of weekly cartoons would go to FedEx, it felt like a small miracle. Then in a few days, it's 'Here we go again.'”

“This was more than just a cow - this was an entire career I was looking at.”

“You know those little snow globes that you shake up? I always thought my brain was sort of like that. You know, where you just give it a shake and watch what comes out and shake it again. It's like that.”

“Cartooning was a good fit for me. And yet now, years later, I almost never think about it.”