Gary Larson Quotes

#1. The comedians I liked were Bill Cosby and Steven Wright, like just always as a comedic actor. I always liked Gary Larson, who's really funny for a cartoonist, obviously.

Demetri Martin

#2. Gary Larson: The funniest cartoonist I've ever seen. His two-volume set (The Complete Far Side) should be the textbook in any course taught on how to be funny on the comics page.

Stephan Pastis

#3. I never liked my own species.

Gary Larson

#4. The fuel light's on, Frank! We're all going to die! Wait, wait ... Oh, my mistake - that's the intercom light.

Gary Larson

#5. 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.'

Gary Larson

#6. If you're gonna shoot an elephant Mr. Schneider, you better be prepared to finish the job.

Gary Larson

#7. 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.

Gary Larson

#8. 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.'

Gary Larson

#9. If a tree falls in the woods, and nobody is around to hear it, and it hits a mime, does anyone care?

Gary Larson

#10. By the time they had diminished from 50 to 8, the other dwarves began to suspect 'Hungry' ...

Gary Larson

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

Gary Larson

#12. 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.

Gary Larson

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

Gary Larson

#14. The problem, Mr. Fudd, is that you've been having a sublimal effect on everyone in the factory. We're proud of our product, Mr. Fudd, and there's no company in the world that build a finer skwoo dwivuh ... Dang! Now you got me doing it!

Gary Larson

#15. Thunderstick? ... You actually said, 'Thunderstick?' ... That, my friend is a Winchester 30.06.

Gary Larson

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

Gary Larson

#17. Theme-park approach to nature. We judge plants and animals by whether they're entertaining to us. We gravitate toward animals and plants that are big, dramatic, beautiful and at eye-level.

Gary Larson

#18. I don't know where my ideas come from. I will admit, however, that one key ingredient is caffeine. I get a couple cups of coffee into me and weird things just start to happen.

Gary Larson

#19. Wait a minute! This is grass! We've been eating grass!

Gary Larson

#20. I don't believe in the concept of hell, but if I did I would think of it as filled with people who were cruel to animals.

Gary Larson

#21. Welcome to Hell. Here's your accordion.

Gary Larson

#22. 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.

Gary Larson

#23. The picture's pretty bleak, gentlemen ... The world's climates are changing, the mammals are taking over, and we all have a brain about the size of a walnut.

Gary Larson

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

Gary Larson

#25. Charters give public school teachers the flexibility to design programs to the individual student needs. They no longer have to go to a distant bureaucracy to ask for permission. By being allowed to make their own decisions the teachers are able to create strong partnerships with parents.

Gary Larson

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

Gary Larson

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

Gary Larson

#28. The idea for any cartoon (my experience, anyway) is rarely spontaneous. Good ideas usually evolve out of pretty lame ones, and vice versa.

Gary Larson

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

Gary Larson

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

Gary Larson

#31. We judge plants and animals by whether they're entertaining to us. We ...

Gary Larson

#32. Things can be low on the food chain, but that doesn't mean they're lowly ...

Gary Larson

#33. I never liked my own species. On why so many of his comics are about animals, in an interview.

Gary Larson

#34. The great thing about this jungle of ours is that anyone of you could grow up to be Lord of the apes.

Gary Larson

#35. 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.

Gary Larson

#36. 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.

Gary Larson

#37. What is that mountain goat doing way up here in the clouds?

Gary Larson

#38. You always hear a headline like this, 'Man Killed By Shark', you never hear it from the other perspective, 'Man Swims in Shark Infested Waters, Forgets He's Shark Food'.

Gary Larson

#39. It is a known fact that the sheep that give us steel wool have no natural enemies.

Gary Larson

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

Gary Larson

#41. Of course, living in an all-glass house has its disadvantages ... but you should see the birds smack it.

Gary Larson

#42. He has been known by many names: Lucifer, Beelzabub, Belial, the Prince of Lies, Satan, and at a party once an obnoxious drunk kept calling him "Dude."

Gary Larson

#43. Hot oil! We need hot oil! ... Forget the water balloons!

Gary Larson

#44. 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.

Gary Larson