Top 100 Lynda Barry Quotes
#1. The happy ending is hardly important, though we may be glad it's there. The real joy is knowing that if you felt the trouble in the story, your kingdom isn't dead.
Lynda Barry
#2. At the center of everything we call 'the arts,' and children call 'play,' is something which seems somehow alive.
Lynda Barry
#3. In health we're doing the digestive system. We each got assigned a topic for an oral report. I got the small intestine. I swear to god I hate my life.
Lynda Barry
#4. It's not hard for me to be funny in front of people, but most of that is just horrified nerves taking the form of what makes people laugh, and afterwards I'd always feel dreadfully depressed, kind of self-induced bi-polar disorder.
Lynda Barry
#5. For 'Picture This,' I wanted it to be a drawing book that didn't have any instructions about drawing, beyond the real simple stuff you'd find like in a Bazooka bubblegum wrapper, or in 'Highlights' magazine. I just wanted it to be feelings about looking and seeing and pictures.
Lynda Barry
#6. My goal on my bucket list is to write a romantic comedy movie.
Lynda Barry
#7. I listen like mad to any conversation taking place next to me just trying to hear why this is funny. Women's restrooms are especially great. I wash my hands twice waiting for people to come in and start talking.
Lynda Barry
#8. No, she answered, one is of tin, and one of straw; one is a girl and another a Lion. None of them is fit to work, so you may tear them into small pieces.
Lynda Barry
#9. I used to live a very social life and never spend much solitary time looking at birds or reading.
Lynda Barry
#10. But paper and ink have conjuring abilities of their own. arrangements of lines and shapes, of letters and words on a series of pages make a world we can dwell and travel in.
Lynda Barry
#11. You may be a lady but your are still the man!
Lynda Barry
#12. Once i knew the blinking cat could not really blink, was just paper and ink.
Lynda Barry
#13. You know that great car-stomach feeling when you fly over a hump? That was my whole body.
Lynda Barry
#16. Going on Letterman is like going off the high dive. It's exhilarating, but after a while it wasn't the kind of thrill I enjoyed.
Lynda Barry
#17. If I didn't try to eavesdrop on every bus ride I take or look for the humor when I go for a walk, I would just be depressed all the time.
Lynda Barry
#18. Part of a horror movie has to be a bit fakey for me to really enjoy it. The new ones are so realistic that they distract me from the ride through the horror.
Lynda Barry
#19. What is an idea made of? Of future, past and also meanwhile.
Lynda Barry
#20. What is an imaginary friend? are there also imaginary enemies?
Lynda Barry
#21. If it is your time, love will track you down like a cruise missile.If you say "No! I don't want it right now," that's when you'll get it for sure. Love will make a way out of no way. Love is an exploding cigar which we willingly smoke.
Lynda Barry
#22. I tried to be like the richer kids as much as I could because I wanted to live on their streets, at least hang out on their streets and eat their amazing food and walk barefoot on their shag carpets. I became something of a pest in that way, and in general, other people's parents didn't like me.
Lynda Barry
#23. I believe [images] are the soul's immune system and transit system.
Lynda Barry
#24. My strips are not always funny, and they can be pretty grim at times, and I know I lose readers because of it, but I can't do anything about it - my work is very much connected to something I need to do in order to feel stable.
Lynda Barry
#26. The point of the daily diary exercise is not to record what you already know about what happened to you in the last 24 hours. Instead, it's an invitation to the back of your mind to come forward and reveal to you the perishable images about the day you didn't notice you noticed at all.
Lynda Barry
#28. Remember how you used to be able to feel your bed breathing and the walls spinning when you were a kid?
Lynda Barry
#29. [Lynda's mother] You're stupid and you don't know it, that's you're problem. You talk, talk, talk, all the time. No one wants to listen to an idiot.
[Young Lynda] Uh. OK. Thanks, Mom.
Lynda Barry
#30. When we finish a book, why do we hold it in both hands and gaze at it as if it were somehow alive?
Lynda Barry
#31. I need to be cheered up a lot. I think funny people are people who need to be cheered up.
Lynda Barry
#32. Love is an exploding cigar we willingly smoke.
Lynda Barry
#33. Mr. Harmong is the cheapest chinztiest most pig-lipped tightwad skanked-out lardo king landlord of all time.
Lynda Barry
#34. Remember when you were in school and the teacher would put a picture under an overhead projector so you could see it on the wall? God, I loved that. Tellya the truth, I used to look at that beam of light and think it was God.
Lynda Barry
#35. If I could only turn the etch-a-sketch of my life upside down.
Lynda Barry
#36. I do love to eavesdrop. It's inspirational, not only for subject matter but for actual dialogue, the way people talk.
Lynda Barry
#37. When you learn about stories in school, you get it backward. You start to think 'Oh, the reason these things are in stories is because a book said I need to put these things in there.' You need a death, as my husband says, and you need a little sidekick with a saying like 'Skivel-dee-doo!'
Lynda Barry
#38. The thing that really struck me when I went to junior high was class. I grew up on a pretty poor street, but the school district I was in included some fine neighborhoods - so I got to know a couple of the kids from those places and went to their houses and experienced such culture shock.
Lynda Barry
#39. When you think about it, giving up your 'real' personality is a small price to pay for the richness of 'living happily ever after' with an actual man!
Lynda Barry
#40. The strips are nearly effortless unless I am really emotionally upset, a wreck.
Lynda Barry
#41. I wasn't afraid to be laughed at or be loud.
Lynda Barry
#42. [Chucky] Ya peanut headed suckerfool!
Take me on!
Ya ugly knuckle butted dogface underpants!
You think I'm playin'?
Lynda Barry
#43. When you are little, you will draw pictures for no reason.
Lynda Barry
#44. The library was open for one hour after school let out. I hid there, looking at art books and reading poetry.
Lynda Barry
#46. You may be a lady but you are still the man!
Lynda Barry
#47. No one stopped me from playing when I was alone, but there were times when I wasn't able to, though I wanted to ... There were times when nothing played back. Writers call it 'writer's block.' For kids there are other names for that feeling, though kids don't usually know them.
Lynda Barry
#48. You can't know what a book is about until the very end. This is true of a book we're reading or writing.
Lynda Barry
#49. Kids don't plan to play. They don't go: 'Barbie, Ken, you ready to play? It's gonna be a three-act.'
Lynda Barry
#50. Like say if the mom and dad of god said he could never get dirty. There would be no world!
Lynda Barry
#51. Same circus, different clowns, and without a doubt I'm one of them.
Lynda Barry
#52. I've gotten a lot of livid letters about the awfulness of my work. I've never known what to make of it. Why do people bother to write if they hate what I do?
Lynda Barry
#53. As I enter the small intestine I get squeezed by muscles. Its dark and the walls look like slimey crushed velvet theres pancreas juice on me help me I am disintigrating.
Lynda Barry
#54. But when the thing that is scaring you is already Jesus, who are you supposed to pray to?
Lynda Barry
#55. 'What It Is' was based on this class I've been teaching for 10 years - I wanted to write a book about writing that didn't mention stuff like story structure, protagonists, and all those things that we know about only because they already exist in stories.
Lynda Barry
#56. A man who has been dead for a week in a hot trailer looks more like a man than you would first expect.
Lynda Barry
#57. Playing and fun are not the same thing, though when we grow up we may forget that and find ourselves mixing up playing with happiness. There can be a kind of amnesia about the seriousness of playing, especially when we played by ourselves.
Lynda Barry
#58. I started doing cartoons when I was about 21. I never thought I would be a cartoonist. It happened behind my back. I was always a painter and drawer.
Lynda Barry
#59. This ability to exist in pieces is what some adults call resilience. And I suppose in some way it is a kind of resilience, a horrible resilience that makes adults believe children forget trauma.
Lynda Barry
#60. Race and class are the easiest divisions. It's very stupid.
Lynda Barry
#61. I am hell with a knife and there is nothing I can really do about it but try and keep my mouth shut and try not to let it show.
Lynda Barry
#62. It's much easier to teach writing, because people are less shy about writing. If they're in a group, nobody can see what they're writing. When you're drawing, people get a little more nervous.
Lynda Barry
#63. When I was working on 'Freddie,' I had been trying to write it on a computer for many, many years, but that delete button just won't let anything go forward.
Lynda Barry
#64. I am not sure how much I would like being married if I wasn't married to him. A man who likes flea markets and isn't gay? I knew I was lucky.
Lynda Barry
#65. Humor is such a wonderful thing, helping you realize what a fool you are but how beautiful that is at the same time.
Lynda Barry
#66. 'Good Times' is a story about the loss of innocence, how adults are responsible for their actions but children aren't.
Lynda Barry
#67. I found myself compelled - like this weird, shameful compulsion - to draw cute animals.
Lynda Barry
#68. My mom didn't want me to go to college. She didn't want me to read - when I read, I may as well have been holding a pineapple.
Lynda Barry
#69. Sometimes I think I'm the craziest person on the planet.
Lynda Barry
#70. You have to be willing to spend time making things for no known reason.
Lynda Barry
#71. It's one thing to have a relationship, to lay your hands on it, and another to make it continue and last. That's something I haven't talked about much in my comic strips, and it's certainly something I'm interested in.
Lynda Barry
#72. I look crazy. I know I do. Been true since I was a kid!
Lynda Barry
#73. When I work on a book, I usually start with a question. And I don't sit around and go 'I need to write a book. What's a good question?' It will be a question that's just clanging around in my head. So for 'What It Is,' it was this idea of 'What is an image?'
Lynda Barry
#74. The thing I call 'my mind' seems to be kind of like a landlord that doesn't really know its tenants.
Lynda Barry
#75. I was unable to sleep and I would stay up and draw these little cartoons. Then a friend showed them around. Before I knew it I was a cartoonist.
Lynda Barry
#76. I remember my comic strips being called 'new wave.' It bugged me.
Lynda Barry
#77. I live in constant fear of being fired or dropped for that dark part of my work I can't control.
Lynda Barry
#78. You keep seeing your picture on posters that you are missing but you're not. That'd be weird, right? Or say you look down at the sidewalk and earthworms are spelling your name. Or you open a peanut bag and the 'hello' is written in your writing on the inside of the shell. Would that weird ya?
Lynda Barry
#79. One by one most kids I knew quit drawing and never drew again. It left behind too much evidence.
Lynda Barry
#80. Gospel singing ... is the rawest, sweetest, uninhibited and exquisite sounds a person can make or hear. It isn't music, it's an entire experience you feel and live. A sound to rise you up again.
Lynda Barry
#81. People think that whatever I put into strips has happened to me in my life.
Lynda Barry
#82. My childhood is always going to limit me.
Lynda Barry
#83. Sometimes, I think the only art left for us is slowly peeling the label off a beer bottle while somebody tells you about a dream they had.
Lynda Barry
#84. Cartoonist was the weirdest name I finally let myself have. I would never say it. When I heard it I silently thought, what an awful word.
Lynda Barry
#85. I go to work the minute I open my eyes.
Lynda Barry
#86. I run a tight ship, but I try and make it seem like I'm not doing that at all.
Lynda Barry
#87. Ask a burning question, get a burning answer
Lynda Barry
#88. In life there are always these things happening if you can just get the joke.
Lynda Barry
#89. Dear Anyone Who Finds This, Do not blame the drugs.
Lynda Barry
#90. When you start to think of the arts as not this thing that is going to get you somewhere in terms of becoming an artist or becoming famous or whatever it is that people do, but rather a way of making being in the world not just bearable, but fascinating, then it starts to get interesting again.
Lynda Barry
#91. I grew up in a house that had a whole lot of trouble. As much trouble as you could imagine.
Lynda Barry
#92. If I had had me for a student I would have thrown me out of class immediately.
Lynda Barry
#93. Are memories pictures or the secret doorway?
Lynda Barry
#94. I think of images as an immune system and a transit system.
Lynda Barry
#95. I didn't know there were different lines of aliveness, and two worlds contained by each other.
Lynda Barry
#96. The histories of vampires and people are not so different, really. How many of us can honestly see our own reflection?
Lynda Barry
#97. Something can only become an illusion after disillusionment. before that, it is something real. what caused the disillusionment? no one told me the print on the wall was just ink and paper and had no life of its own. at some point the cat stopped blinking, and i stopped thinking it could.
Lynda Barry
#98. And I could tell she loved him. And although she was an evil fungus growing on 200 pounds of irritated lard, her feelings were real.
Lynda Barry
#99. These are very confusing times. For the first time in history a woman is expected to combine: intelligence with a sharp hairdo, a raised consciousness with high heels, and an open, nonsexist relationship with a tan guy who has a great bod.
Lynda Barry
#100. We don't create a fantasy world to escape reality, we create it to be able to stay.
Lynda Barry
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
