Mort Walker

“Old cartoonists never retire, they just erase away.”

“Professionals don't get writer's block. I can always come up with the punch line.”

“The people who were against the Vietnam War thought I was attacking the Army. The guys in the Army thought I was representing their experiences. I was on both sides, and I survived.”

“I've always said that what cartoonists do is create friends for readers.”

“Seven days without laughter makes one weak.”

“Comics have always helped people to read. A lot of people learned to read by reading the comics. And it's our livelihood, after all. If people don't know how to read, they're not reading our comics.”

“Beetle is the embodiment of everybody's resistance to authority, all the rules and regulations which you've got to follow. He deals with it in his own way. And in a way, it's sort of what I did when I was in the Army. I just oftentimes did what I wanted to do.”

“You learn just by trying and experimenting. By the time I was 14, I had my own comic strip in the Kansas City paper.”

“I don't know how I'd be retired. I wake up every day with another idea.”

“Most people are sort of against authority. Here's Beetle always challenging authority. I think people relate to it.”

“Everything I know, I write about. My only research is what I did.”

“When the war was over and the guys were back to shaving every day, the editor thought the Beetle Bailey strips were hurting their disciplinary efforts to get the guys back to routine.”

“About the only way you can find out about the common man, his slang, what he looked like, what he thought, is through the comic strips. It's a powerful way for young people to learn history.”

“I took my basic training on a golf course in Florida. Then I was on the boxing team. We did some demonstrations, and they put me in a theater one night and wanted me to box. So OK, I came out boxing with a friend - thinking we would just spar around - but the guy walked out, hit me, and knocked me out with one stroke.”

“I first sold a cartoon for five dollars. I was in the fifth grade.”

“I say, if you believe what you read in the comic strips, then you believe that mice run around with little gold buttons on their red pants and drive cars.”

“Some people will do schlock or anything, just to get their name on it.”

“Belly buttons were a big battle of mine. Down at the syndicate, they would clip them out with a razor blade. I began putting so many of them in, in the margins and everywhere, that they had a little box down there called 'Beetle Bailey''s Belly-Button Box. The editors finally gave up after I did one strip showing a delivery of navel oranges.”

“When I first started, you couldn't mention divorce or death. You couldn't show smelly socks. You couldn't show a snake. They took a skunk out of my strip one time.”

“When I introduced a black soldier, Lt. Flap, in 1971, the Stars and Stripes banned the strip. They were having racial problems and thought it would increase the tensions.”