Bill Griffith Quotes

#1. My first character was Mr. Toad.

Bill Griffith

#2. A full, rich drawing style is a drawback.

Bill Griffith

#3. I think Zippy is part of me, but I'm not Zippy.

Bill Griffith

#4. Comics is a language. It's a language most people understand intuitively.

Bill Griffith

#5. But now with technology I could sit down and do a bunch of character drawings and scan them into a computer, and the computer using my exact style could bring it into life, where it would have been edited by various human beings before.

Bill Griffith

#6. Are we having fun yet?

Bill Griffith

#7. I went to an art school in Brooklyn and painted Fine Art, if that's what you'd call it for eight years in New York, until I saw the first underground comics in the East Village Other.

Bill Griffith

#8. She encouraged any artistic impulse I had, and my father discouraged any artistic impulse I had. They took out their problems with each other on me and my sister.

Bill Griffith

#9. Unfortunately what came out of it was also kind of an imitation community with a lot of mindless conformity.

Bill Griffith

#10. Everyone says how Calvin and Hobbes is about a real kid, to me there's nothing real about it; it's an adult using a kid's body as a mouthpiece.

Bill Griffith

#11. I always thought of Levittown as a joke.

Bill Griffith

#12. All life is a blur of Republicans and meat.

Bill Griffith

#13. I had a very diametrically opposite set of parents.

Bill Griffith

#14. What I do is draw but if you make an animated feature obviously it takes a whole team of people, and Zippy is my work. I felt that turning it over to a team of people would be wrong.

Bill Griffith

#15. Zippy is living in the moment.

Bill Griffith

#16. Mike Judge, who I've become friends with over the years never took himself seriously as an artist.

Bill Griffith

#17. I had a mixture, my father was a career army man and my mother was a writer.

Bill Griffith

#18. Frivolity is a stern taskmaster.

Bill Griffith

#19. Zippy accepts chaos as what it is, which is the real order of everything.

Bill Griffith

#20. Going too far is half the pleasure of not getting anywhere.

Bill Griffith

#21. If something is going on in my life, it winds up getting into my strip.

Bill Griffith

#22. Yes, but personally I was never a big acid head.

Bill Griffith

#23. I hate Calvin and Hobbes. I think its a big re-hash of formula kid strips.

Bill Griffith

#24. Then I abandoned comics for fine art because I had some romantic vision of being like Vincent Van Gogh Jr.

Bill Griffith

#25. I just became one with my browser software.

Bill Griffith

#26. I guess if you take yourself seriously as an artist there starts either the problem or the beauty of doing good artwork.

Bill Griffith

#27. Everybody that loves Nancy loves it in a slightly condescending way. Nancy is comics reduced to their most elemental level.

Bill Griffith

#28. The down side of Americans being obsessed with pop culture is that they kind of like it light.

Bill Griffith

#29. Vegetarianism can easily reach religious proportions. Refraining from meat on moral grounds serves to dignify feelings of guilt toward sad-eyed, furry creatures and substitutes righteousness for squeamishness.

Bill Griffith

#30. Looking back Little Lulu was an early feminist, but at the time I just thought she was a really feisty developed comic strip character.

Bill Griffith

#31. Jazz, rock and roll, movies and comics are the culture of America.

Bill Griffith

#32. Their scrambled attention spans struck me as a metaphor for the way we get our doses of reality these days.

Bill Griffith

#33. Well, I've done a lot of strips since I've been here about Zippy and me being in Connecticut.

Bill Griffith

#34. When I was an art student in the early 60's before the acid scene began I was smoking pot just like anyone else who was an artist.

Bill Griffith