Jules Feiffer Quotes

I told the doctor I was overtired, anxiety-ridden, compulsively active, constantly depressed, with recurring fits of paranoia. Turns out I'm normal.

Artists can color the sky red because they know it's blue. Those of us who aren't artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we're stupid.

Design is important because chaos is so hard.

Be warned against all 'good' advice because 'good' advice is necessarily 'safe' advice, and though it will undoubtedly follow a sane pattern, it will very likely lead one into total sterility--one of the crushing problems of our time.

I used to think I was poor. Then they told me I was not poor, I was needy. They told me it was self-defeating to think of myself as needy, I was deprived. Then they told me underprivileged was overused. I was disadvantaged. I still do not have a dime but I have a great vocabulary.

We are all continually embarking on first drafts, in every aspect of our lives.

I grew up to have my father's looks, my father's speech patterns, my father's posture, my father's opinions, and my mother's contempt for my father.

Imagination continually frustrates tradition; that is its function.

Maturity is only a short break in adolescence.

Remember when you were a kid and the boys didn't like the girls? Only sissies liked girls? What I'm trying to tell you is that nothing's changed. You think boys grow out of not liking girls, but we don't grow out of it. We just grow horny. That's the problem. We mix up liking pussy for liking girls. Believe me, one couldn't have less to do with the other.

If you are not able to communicate successfully between yourself and yourself, how are you supposed to make it with the strangers outside?

At sixteen I was stupid, confused and indecisive. At twenty-five I was wise, self-confident, prepossessing and assertive. At forty-five I am stupid, confused, insecure and indecisive. Who would have supposed that maturity is only a short break in adolescence?

The artwork had very little to do with the thought process, and the writing too, for that matter. What happens, happens, and it happens outside the brain.

Over the years, I discovered over and over again that once you lose control, you have a chance of getting good at it. And once you're controlling the work, it's not going to be very good, or it won't be as good as it should be.

Jesus died to forgive our sins. Dare we make his martyrdom meaningless by not committing them?

Writing, I explained, was mainly an attempt to out-argue one's past; to present events in such a light that battles lost in life were either won on paper or held to a draw.

Getting out of bed in the morning is an act of false confidence.

I was never interested in the two-party system per se. I was interested in how authority was abused by government, and how lies were told, and rewritten, to seem to be true. I came up out of a tradition of radical journalism.

There's some brain damage, but it may be that very brain damage that allows me to do the work I do.

Eventually, if it's on your mind, you stumble on it. You need a certain amount of luck and persistence.

I don't know how comic artists feed their families, if they do. But it's a fascinating form and so I think that after a long period of nothing happening and work, nothing very impressive, we are into another golden age of comics. Unfortunately, it's not a golden age for the artists themselves economically. I don't know how they get along.

I didn't have a job. Employers were afraid of losing their reputations. I didn't have a reputation. I had zilch. So, I had the freedom, which unemployment gives you, and that was to behave as badly as I believed I should under the circumstances. And the circumstances were quite awful.

When I write a play, my whole intent at bottom is to get the audience to be in the cast, to get that audience on stage with the actors and to get them thoroughly involved in what's going on.

It is not size or age that separates children from adults. It is responsibility.

Whatever New York loses, if you go to other cities around the world, or around the country, New York still has a kind of energy level you find nowhere else. Paris doesn't have it, London doesn't have it, San Francisco, a great city, doesn't have it.