Stephan Pastis

“Basically, I learned to read by reading 'Peanuts,' just wanting to know what they were saying. I was 4 or 5 or whatever. I think it's a fairly common story.”

“I don't like drawing characters facing right.”

“I do what makes me laugh.”

“I like characters who have blind spots and are full of themselves, but there also needs to be vulnerability.”

“The wonderful thing about a book is that you have a canvas that is 300 pages wide, and it's all free space. You can make a piece of art as big as you want and whatever shape you want.”

“For me, going to Minneapolis is like going to Mecca.”

“I don't pay that much attention to sales figures or awards. To me, the big question is: 'Did you influence the next generation?' That's my goal.”

“The principles of comedy are the principles of comedy. I can hear funny.”

“The writing is done on the computer, and the drawing is done by hand. I write, write, write, then I hit the illustration.”

“You can't just count on becoming a syndicated cartoonist. I actually tried to calculate the odds once, and the best I could come up with is a 1-in-36,000 chance. And the odds of getting hit by lightning are 1 in 7,900 - which kind of shows how long those odds are.”

“I want to shake things up like 'Bloom County' did.”

“We need more cartoonists to truly retire when they retire, and not run repeats.”

“I was a lawyer for 10 years, and when you're in law, things really have to get done, or somebody sues you. It's a great trick.”

“I guess that compared to other comic strips, I'm edgy. But put me along something like 'South Park,' and I'm 'Captain Kangaroo.'”

“When I say 'friends,' I use that term loosely, as I don't actually have any.”

“I like characters like Ignatius Reilly in 'A Confederacy of Dunces' and Ricky Gervais's character in 'The Office.' They think one thing about themselves, but the truth is as far from that as it can be. So I began to think about how to put that kind of character in a book for kids.”

“You can write a little and can draw a little, but there's necessarily a limitation on both in a comic strip, since it appears in such a tiny space.”

“Basically, I learned to read by reading 'Peanuts,' just wanting to know what they were saying.”

“Maybe the bar is low, but most of the strips that are 50, 60, 70 years old that are on their second or third generation of artists, the humor is pretty bland. There are others by people that were raised on 'Family Guy' or 'South Park' that are edgier. Mine's not as edgy as those, but it's edgier than 'Beetle Bailey.'”

“If somebody is not on the same page with me humor wise, I can't give them that.”