Our most important aim is to develop definite personalities in our cartoon characters. We don't want them to be just shadows, for merely as moving figures they provoke no emotional response from the public. We invest them with life a caricature of life.

If you're an aspiring show maker, and you have the means to sit around for a few months, you should be making funny cartoons and uploading them to the internet. I feel like I've discovered this secret about the entertainment industry it's that they're desperate. They're super, super desperate for new talent and constantly developing and canceling things all the time. It's the nature of the business, so if you're one of those people who can make a cartoon so funny that it gets a ton of hits on the internet then the industry is going to be all over your business.

My issues (with cartooning) were totally about: one, I just burnt out on the strip and the deadlines were brutal. Two, I didn't feel like there was much of a future in print. I thought I needed to quit because I saw the newspapers slowly going away. I didn't want to be caught off guard. I felt more comfortable being a screenwriter, and as I learned how to become a producer, it seemed like a more natural fit for me than cartooning. I still do animation, and I think animation will always be a part of what I do, but I'm trying to do more live-action stuff and I think that's really going to be my focus.

Earn a character first if you can. And if you can't assume one.

Imagine for yourself a character, a model personality, whose example you determine to follow, in private as well as in public.

For acting, the best way to be in character is to embody and become the character in the best way possible.

If an artist can't do anymore, then he should just quit; and an artist ought to be able to change his style without feeling bad. I heard that Lichtenstein said he might not be painting comic strips a year of two from now . I think that would be so great, to be able to change styles. And I think that's what's going to happen; that's going to be the whole new scene.

I hope when artists write new characters, we invent new archetypes and they are visions of ways that we can be...What we need to do is to be able to imagine the possibility of a playful, peaceful, nurturing, mothering man, and we need to imagine the possibilities of a powerful, nonviolent woman and the possibilities of harmonious communities and if we can just imagine them, that would be the first step toward building them and becoming them. (1990)

Half the time, I live under [the guise of] my characters, so if I start to create an ‘official character’ for myself, it would be exhausting.

I cartoon because I got tired of feeling excluded from the comic stage.

You should always determine first what you want to say. It's a bad situation for a cartoonist to think of his pictures first...A cartoonist should get out of bed mad and stay mad. The cartoonist's function is essentially a negative one, and the cartoon that advocates something usually says nothing.

the essential thing for a cartoonist is information. The more information you have “laid down” in your head, the more options you will have to create cartoons that are not trite or repetitive, and the better your ideas will be. This also presupposes a work ethic that requires you to rediscover yourself every day, and allows you to avoid “easy” solutions.

Characters have a way of taking on a life on their own, expressing themselves in the simple philosophy of their times, and expressing beliefs acquired through living, working, and being. Once characters are established, they become their own persons and the ideas of the characters are such ideas as they might have acquired in the circumstances of their daily existence.

Pretend that you are a writer of fiction, and you create a character. This character is so independent, alive and real, that it in turn forms other characters -- and each writes its own book, or forms its own reality. That is a truer picture of your position.