Gary Larson Quotes

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

"I love parasites! I can't get enough of them."

"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."

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

"On Career Day in high school, you don't walk around looking for the cartoon guy."

"Morbid humor is very valid, even healthy, as long as you don't do it gratuitously."

"You should always leave the party 10 minutes before you actually do."

"I didn't want to go to school for more than four years, and I didn't know what you did with a bachelor's in biology. So I switched over and got my degree in communications. I regret it now. It was one of the most idiotic things I ever did."

"I think I'm maintaining the quality, but internally I'm paying for it."

"I don't think I'd know if I were sitting next to Charles Schulz on an airplane."

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

"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."

"I've always considered music stores to be the graveyards of musicians."

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

"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."

"I actually find a lot of parallels in jazz and cartooning."

"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.'"

"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.'"

"I think one thing that's important to maintain is a sense of fear, always doubting yourself... a good dose of insecurity helps your work in some ways."

"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."

"The message is not so much that the worms will inherit the Earth, but that all things play a role in nature, even the lowly worm."

"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."

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

"I've always thought the word cow was funny. And cows are sort of tragic figures. Cows blur the line between tragedy and humor."

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

"Taking a solo on a tune is always a little bit scary."

"I didn't realize I was working in a family medium."

"If I didn't understand a cartoon in a newspaper, I'd just turn the page."

"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."

"As a kid I used to raise snakes. Obviously, my social life was a bit down at the time. But it took me a while to realise that with an interest like that people are going to think there's something wrong with you."