| . . . it's worth recognizing that there is no such thing as an overnight success. You will do well to cultivate the resources in yourself that bring you happiness outside of success or failure. The truth is, most of us discover where we are headed when we arrive. At that time, we turn around and say, yes, this is obviously where I was going all along. It's a good idea to try to enjoy the scenery on the detours, because you'll probably take a few. Bill Watterson |
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Calvin: Sometimes when I'm talking, my words can't keep up with my thoughts. I wonder why we think faster than we speak.
Hobbes: Probably so we can think twice.
Bill Watterson Remarks |
| A box of new crayons! Now they're all pointy, lined up in order, bright and perfect. Soon they'll be a bunch of ground down, rounded, indistinguishable stumps, missing their wrappers and smudged with other colors. Sometimes life seems unbearably tragic. Bill Watterson |
| A REAL job is a job you hate. Bill Watterson |
| After today, I'll bet Santa takes a shovel to the reindeer stalls to fill your stocking. Bill Watterson |
| Amazingly, much of the best cartoon work was done early on in the medium's history. The early cartoonists, with no path before them, produced work of such sophistication, wit, and beauty that it increasingly seems to me that cartoon evolution is working backward. Comic strips are moving toward a primordial goo rather than away from it . . . Not only can comics be more than we're getting today. but the comics already have been more than we're getting today. Bill Watterson Remarks |
| At school, new ideas are thrust at you every day. Out in the world, you'll have to find the inner motivation to search for new ideas on your own. Bill Watterson |
| By golly, life's too darn short to waste time trying to please every meddlesome moron who's got an idea how I ought to be! I don't need advice! Everyone can just stay out of my face! Bill Watterson Remarks |
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| Enemy fighters at two o'clock!Roger. What should I do until then? Bill Watterson |
| Experience is food for the brain. Bill Watterson |
| From now on, I'll connect the dots my own way. Bill Watterson Quotes |
| Genius is never understood in its own time. Bill Watterson Quotes |
| Getting an inch of snow is like winning 10 cents in the lottery. Bill Watterson Quotations |
| 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. Bill Watterson Adages |
| Heck, what's a little extortion among friends? Bill Watterson Quotes |
| 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. Bill Watterson |
| 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. Bill Watterson Sayings |
| Hobbes: Do you think there's a God? Calvin: Well, SOMEBODY'S out to get me. Bill Watterson |
| 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. Bill Watterson |
| I find my life is a lot easier the lower I keep everyone's expectations. Bill Watterson Sayings |
| 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. Bill Watterson |
| 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! Bill Watterson |
| I just read this great science fiction story. It's about how machines take control of humans and turn them into zombie slaves! . . . HEY! What time is it?? My TV show is on! Bill Watterson Adages |
| I know the world isn't fair, but why isn't it ever unfair in my favor? Bill Watterson Quotes |
| I learned about what I love. Imagination, deep friendship, animals, family, the natural world, ideas and ideals ... and silliness. Bill Watterson |
| I like these cold, gray winter days. Days like these let you savor a bad mood. Bill Watterson |
| I liked things better when I didn't understand them. Bill Watterson Remarks |
| I say, if your knees aren't green by the end of the day, you ought to seriously re-examine your life. Bill Watterson |
| I say, when life gives you a lemon, wing it right back and add some lemons of your own! Bill Watterson |
| I thought my life would seem more interesting with a musical score and a laugh track. Bill Watterson |
| I won't eat any cereal that doesn't turn the milk purple. Bill Watterson |
| 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. Bill Watterson Quotations |
| I'm not dumb. I just have a command of thoroughly useless information. Bill Watterson Adages |
| I've got to start listening to those quiet, nagging doubts. Bill Watterson Adages |
| 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. Bill Watterson Quotes |
| If life is just a stage, then we are all running around ad-libbing, with absolutely no clue what the plot is. Maybe that's why we don't know whether it's a comedy or tragedy. Bill Watterson Adages |
| If people sat outside and looked at the stars each night, I'll bet they'd live a lot differently. Bill Watterson Sayings |
| 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. Bill Watterson Popular Quotes |
| If something is so complicated that you can't explain it in 10 minutes, than it's probably not worth knowing anyways. Bill Watterson |
| If you can't control your peanut butter, you can't expect to control your life. Bill Watterson |
| If you do the job badly enough, sometimes you don't get asked to do it again. Bill Watterson |
| If you have the personalities down, you understand them and identify with them; you can stick them in any situation and have a pretty good idea of how they're going to respond. Then it's just a matter of sanding and polishing up the jokes. But if you've got more ambiguous characters or stock stereotypes, the plastic comes through and they don't work as well. These two characters clicked for me almost immediately and I feel very comfortable working with them. Bill Watterson |
| If your knees aren't green by the end of the day, you ought to seriously re-examine your life. Bill Watterson Adages |
| It took hundreds of years for these woods to grow, and they leveled it in a week. It's gone. After they build new houses here, they'll have to widen the roads and put up gas stations, and pretty soon the whole area will just be a big strip. Eventually there won't be a nice spot left anywhere. I wonder if you can refuse to inherit the world. Bill Watterson |
| It's a cruel season that makes you get ready for bed while it's light out. Bill Watterson Sayings |
| It's surprising how hard we'll work when the work is done just for ourselves. Bill Watterson |
| Know what's weird? Day by day, nothing seems to change. But pretty soon, everything's different. Bill Watterson Quotations |
| Let it to a girl to take the fun out of sex discrimination. Bill Watterson |
| Letting your mind play is the best way to solve problems. Bill Watterson |
| Mom and Dad can make the rulesAnd certain things forbid,But I can make them wish that theyhad never had a kid. Bill Watterson Sayings |
| Mom and Dad say I should make my life an example of the principles I believe in. But every time I do, they tell me to stop it. Bill Watterson |
| No more of parental rules!We're heading for the snow!Good riddance to those grown up ghouls!We're leaving! Yukon Ho! Bill Watterson |
| Nothing helps a bad mood like spreading it around. Bill Watterson Remarks |
| 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. Bill Watterson Sayings |
| Oh look, yet another Christmas TV special! How touching to have the meaning of Christmas brought to us by cola, fast food, and beer conglomerates. Who'd have ever guessed that product consumption, popular entertainment, and spirituality would mix so harmoniously? It's a beautiful world all right. Bill Watterson |
| People who get nostalgic about childhood were obviously never children. Bill Watterson Adages |
| 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. Bill Watterson |
| Reality continues to ruin my life. Bill Watterson Adages |
| Shutting off the thought process is not rejuvenating; the mind is like a car battery -- it recharges by running. Bill Watterson Quotations |
| Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us. Bill Watterson Sayings |
| 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. Bill Watterson |
| Such is American business, I guess, where the desire for obscene profit mutes any discussion of conscience. Bill Watterson |
| That's the whole problem with science. You've got a bunch of empiricists trying to describe things of unimaginable wonder. Bill Watterson |
| The problem with the future is that it keeps turning into the present. Bill Watterson |
| 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! Bill Watterson Adages |
| The real fun of living wisely is that you get to be smug about it. Bill Watterson |
| The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us. Bill Watterson |
| The whole pleasure for me is having the opportunity to do a comic strip for a living, and now that I've finally got that I'm not going to give it away. . . . Any time somebody else has their hand in the ink it's changing the product, and I enjoy the responsibility for this product. I'm willing to take the blame if the strip goes down the drain, and I want the credit if it succeeds. So long as it has my name on it, I want it to be mine. Bill Watterson |
| There is not enough time to do all the nothing we want to do. Bill Watterson |
| There's an inverse relationship between how good something is for you, and how much fun it is. Bill Watterson Sayings |
| There's never enough time to do all the nothing you want. Bill Watterson |
| They can't chain my spirit! My spirit runs free! Walls can't contain it! Laws can't restrain it! Authority has no power over it! Bill Watterson |
| Things are never quite as scary when you've got a best friend. Bill Watterson |
| 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. Bill Watterson Remarks |
| 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. Bill Watterson |
| 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. Bill Watterson Quotes |
| Weekends don't count unless you spend them doing something completely pointless. Bill Watterson Popular Quotes |
| Whenever I hear about people trying to rediscover the "child within," I want to scream. Bill Watterson Popular Quotes |
| 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!"? Bill Watterson |
| Why waste time learning, when ignorance is instantaneous? Bill Watterson Adages |
| You should stick with what you enjoy, what you find funny -- that's the humor that will be the strongest, and that will transmit itself. Rather then trying to find out what the latest trend is, you should draw what is personally interesting. Bill Watterson Quotes |
| [Calvin: A 6-year-old boy who thinks like a grown-up and fantasizes like a child.] Calvin is very frenetic, ... The thing I like about him is that he's very curious, and everything in the world is new to him. Bill Watterson Sayings |
