Bill Watterson Quotations

Things are never quite as scary when you've got a best friend.

The problem with the future is that it keeps turning into the present.

Getting an inch of snow is like winning 10 cents in the lottery.

The world of a comic strip ought to be a special place with its own logic and life... I don't want the issue of Hobbes's reality settled by a doll manufacturer.

Know what's weird? Day by day, nothing seems to change. But pretty soon, everything's different.

God put me on this earth to accomplish a certain number of things. Right now I am so far behind that I will never die.

It's not denial. I'm just selective about the reality I accept.

We all have different desires and needs, but if we don't discover what we want from ourselves and what we stand for, we will live passively and unfulfilled. Sooner or later, we are all asked to compromise ourselves and the things we care about. We define ourselves by our actions. With each decision, we tell ourselves and the world who we are. Think about what you want out of this life, and recognize that there are many kinds of success.

Nothing helps a bad mood like spreading it around.

From now on, I'll connect the dots my own way.

Shutting off the thought process is not rejuvenating; the mind is like a car battery - it recharges by running.

If people sat outside and looked at the stars each night, I'll bet they'd live a lot differently.

The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure pure reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!

Why waste time learning, when ignorance is instantaneous?

It seems like once people grow up, they have no idea what's cool.

Letting your mind play is the best way to solve problems.

If you can't control your peanut butter, you can't expect to control your life.

Genius is never understood in its own time.

I think we dream so we don't have to be apart so long. If we're in each other's dreams, we can play together all night.

Sometimes when I'm talking, my words can't keep up with my thoughts. I wonder why we think faster than we speak. Probably so we can think twice.

I know the world isn't fair, but why isn't it ever unfair in my favor?

We don't devote enough scientific research to finding a cure for jerks.

Weekends don't count unless you spend them doing something completely pointless.

Often it takes some calamity to make us live in the present. Then suddenly we wake up and see all the mistakes we have made.

The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us.

I've got to start listening to those quiet, nagging doubts.

I won't eat any cereal that doesn't turn the milk purple.

I liked things better when I didn't understand them.

If your knees aren't green by the end of the day, you ought to seriously re-examine your life.

I find my life is a lot easier the lower I keep everyone's expectations.

There is not enough time to do all the nothing we want to do.

Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.

Talking with you is sort of the conversational equivalent of an out of body experience.

If I had rolled along with the strip's popularity and repeated myself for another five, 10 or 20 years, the people now 'grieving' for 'Calvin and Hobbes' would be wishing me dead.

When birds burp, it must taste like bugs.

I'm not dumb. I just have a command of thoroughly useless information.

I thought my life would seem more interesting with a musical score and a laugh track.

It's surprising how hard we'll work when the work is done just for ourselves.

So, what's it like in the real world? Well, the food is better, but beyond that, I don't recommend it.

It's always better to leave the party early.

A real job is a job you hate.

That's the whole problem with science. You've got a bunch of empiricists trying to describe things of unimaginable wonder.

I'd like to have the opportunity to draw this strip for years and see where it goes. It's sort of a scary thing now to imagine; these cartoonists who've been drawing a strip for twenty years. I can't imagine coming up with that much material. If I just take it day by day, though, it's a lot of fun, and I do think I have a long way to go before I've exhausted the possibilities.

I didn't want 'Calvin and Hobbes' to coast into halfhearted repetition, as so many long-running strips do. I was ready to pursue different artistic challenges, work at a less frantic pace ... and start restoring some balance to my life.

Mom and Dad can make the rulesAnd certain things forbid,But I can make them wish that theyhad never had a kid.

If cartoonists would look at this more as an art than as a part time job or a get-rich-quick scheme, I think comics overall would be better. I think there's a tremendous potential to be tapped.

I hate to subject it to too much analysis, but one thing I have fun with is the rarity of things being shown from an adult's perspective. When Hobbes is a stuffed toy in one panel and alive in the next, I'm juxtaposing the ""grown-up"" version of reality with Calvin's version, and inviting the reader to decide which is truer. Most of the time, the strip is drawn simply from Calvin's perspective, and Hobbes is as real as anyone.

I have a hammer! I can put things together! I can knock things apart! I can alter my environment at will and make an incredible din all the while! Ah, it's great to be male!

If someone wants to be a cartoonist, let's see him develop his own strip instead of taking over the duties of someone else's. We've got too many comic strip corpses being propped up and passed for living by new cartoonists who ought to be doing something of their own. If a cartoonist isn't good enough to make it on his own work, he has no business being in the newspaper.

If something is so complicated that you can't explain it in 10 minutes, than it's probably not worth knowing anyways.

Hobbes got all my better qualities (with a few quirks from our cats), and Calvin my ranting, escapist side. Together, they're pretty much a transcript of my mental diary ... it's pretty startling to reread these strips and see my personality exposed so plainly right there on paper. I meant to disguise that better.

Hobbes might be a little closer to me in terms of personality, with Calvin being more energetic, brash, always looking for life on the edge. He lives entirely in the present, and whatever he can do to make that moment more exciting he'll just let fly . . . and I'm really not like that at all.

I say, when life gives you a lemon, wing it right back and add some lemons of your own!

Such is American business, I guess, where the desire for obscene profit mutes any discussion of conscience.

I'm sick of everybody telling me what to do.

I was not prepared for the resulting attention. Besides disliking the diminishment of privacy and the inhibiting quality of feeling watched, I valued my anonymous, boring life. In fact, I didn't see how I could write honestly without it. A year later, I moved out west, got an unlisted phone number, stopped giving interviews, and tried to fly as low under the radar as possible. Of course, some reporters took this as a personal challenge to intrude, but in general, my quiet life let me concentrate on my work.

True, comics are a popular art, and yes, I believe their primary obligation is to entertain, but comics can go beyond that, and when they do, they move from silliness to significance.

To make a bad day worse, spend it wishing for the impossible.

To make a business decision, you don't need much philosophy; all you need is greed, and maybe a little knowledge of how the game works.

Who was the guy who first looked at a cow and said, "I think I'll drink whatever comes out of these things when I squeeze 'em!"?

Whenever I hear about people trying to rediscover the ""child within,"" I want to scream.

A little rudeness and disrespect can elevate a meaningless interaction to a battle of wills and add drama to an otherwise dull day.

The truth is, most of us discover where we are headed when we arrive.

When I get to the drawing, I really enjoy taking a big chunk of time and working on the drawing and nothing else. That allows me to make sure that I'm really challenging the art, making each picture as interesting as I can.

Look! A trickle of water running through some dirt! I'd say our afternoon just got booked solid!

Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive... To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it's still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble.

I was offered a job at the Cincinnati Post as their editorial cartoonist in a trial six month arrangement. The agreement was that they could fire me or I could quit with no questions asked if things didn't work out during the first few months. Sure enough, things didn't work out, and they fired me, no questions asked.

The real fun of living wisely is that you get to be smug about it.

I write separately from the inking up. I'm sure this varies from cartoonist to cartoonist; I find that the writing is the hard part and the drawing is the fun part.

You know, maybe we don't need enemies." "Yeah, best friends aree about all I can take.

If you've ever compared a film to a novel it's based on, you know the novel gets bludgeoned. It's inevitable, because different media have different strengths and needs, and when you make a movie, the movie's needs get served.

What's the point of wearing your favorite rocket ship underpants if nobody ever asks to see 'em?

They say the secret of success is being at the right place at the right time, but since you never know when the right time is going to be, I figure the trick is to find the right place and just hang around.

I'm pulling out different aspects of my personality in writing each character and, if I'm doing my job well, I'm being true to the situation and true to the character.

I asked mom if I was a gifted child. She said they certainly wouldn't have paid for me.

Happiness isn't good enough for me! I demand euphoria!

What fun is it being cool if you can't wear a sombrero?

History is the fiction we invent to persuade ourselves that events are knowable and that life has order and direction. That's why events are always reinterpreted when values change. We need new versions of history to allow for our current prejudices.

All the new media will inevitably change the look, function, and maybe even the purpose of comics, but comics are vibrant and versatile, so I think they'll continue to find relevance one way or another. But they definitely won't be the same as what I grew up with.

Calvin: Know what I pray for? Hobbes: What? Calvin: The strength to change what I can, the inability to accept what I can't, and the incapacity to tell the difference.

They say the world is a stage. But obviously the play is unrehearsed and everybody is ad-libbing his lines." "Maybe that’s why it’s hard to tell if we’re living in a tragedy or a farce." "We need more special effects and dance numbers.

What I try to do in writing any character is to put myself in his position.

Like delicate lace, So the threads intertwine, Oh, gossamer web Of wond'rous design! Such beauty and grace Wild nature produces... Ughh, look at the spider Suck out that bug's juices!

Calvin: ME TARZAN! KING OF JUNGLE! Suzy: Nice underpants. Does your mom know you're over here like this? Calvin:...I don't think Jane EVER said that to Tarzan.

We consume everything like potato chips. In this environment, I suspect the cartoonist's connection with readers is likely to be superficial and fleeting, unless he taps into some fervent special interest niche. And that audience, almost by definition, will be tiny.

Reading those turgid philosophers here in these remote stone buildings may not get you a job, but if those books have forced you to ask yourself questions about what makes life truthful, purposeful, meaningful, and redeeming, you have the Swiss Army Knife of mental tools, and it's going to come in handy all the time.

Calvin: Dad where do babies come from? Dad: Well Calvin, you simply go to Sears, buy the kit and follow the assembly instructions. Calvin: I came from Sears? Dad: No you were a blue-light special at K-Mart - almost as good and a lot cheaper!

At school, new ideas are thrust at you every day. Out in the world, you'll have to find your inner motivation to seek for new ideas on your own.

If you're a painter, it's simply taken for granted that you'll spend a lot of time in museums studying great paintings, but if you're a cartoonist, it used to be very hard to see an original cartoon drawing.

Repetition is the death of magic.

You can drag my body to school but my spirit refuses to go.

That's the difference between me and the rest of the world! Happiness isn't good enough for me! I demand euphoria!

I enjoy the drawing more than the writing, so I try to think of ideas that will allow me to develop the visual side of the strip as fully as possible.

CALVIN: Isn't it strange that evolution would give us a sense of humor? When you think about it, it's weird that we have a physiological response to absurdity. We laugh at nonsense. We like it. We think it's funny. Don't you think it's odd that we appreciate absurdity? Why would we develop that way? How does it benefit us? HOBBES: I suppose if we couldn't laugh at the things that don't make sense, we couldn't react to a lot of life.

It's a cruel season that makes you get ready for bed while it's light out.

If good things lasted forever, would we appreciate how precious they are?

Each kind of story has its own problems in writing, but my main concern really is to keep the reader on his toes, or to keep the strip unpredictable. I try to achieve some sort of balance between the two that keeps the reader wondering what's going to happen next and be surprised.

I hope some historian will confirm that I was the first cartoonist to use the word 'booger' in a newspaper comic strip.

Who was the guy who first looked at a cow and said 'I think I’ll drink whatever comes out of these when I squeeze ’em?

To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it's still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble.