Stephan Pastis

“You act like a team player,you be nice to everyone for your entire life,then you die.”

“Humility is what you strive for when you've failed at everything else.”

“It's best to love your family as you would a Siberian tiger-from a distance, preferably separated by bars.”

“My wife Staci made me go to a wedding last weekend...If it weren’t for her, I’d be happy.”

“When people bore me, I close my eyes and try to remember the order the Seven Dwarfs marched in. But it's not always the dwarfs I think about. Sometimes aI try to list all of the Canadian provinces.”

“I put Post-It notes everywhere to remind me of everything. I stick a ton of them on my computer monitor, telephone, and wallet. The problem now is that there are so many of them that my mind has blocked them all out. So I now need Post-It notes to remind me to look at my Post-It notes.”

“I recently forced myself to read a book on quantum physics, just to try and learn something new. I was confused by the middle of the first sentence and it all went downhill from there. The only thing I can remember learning is that a parallel universe can theoretically be contained on the head of a needle. I don't really know what that means, but I am now more careful handling needles.”

“If a restaurant offers crayons, I always take them and color throughout the meal. It beats talking to the people I came to dinner with.”

“One funny image can sometimes save an otherwise mediocre strip. At least that's what I tell myself so I don't feel quite as crappy when I've just wasted four hours drawing and coloring a Sunday strip.”

“Whenever I see people with their collars up, I'm tempted to point it out to them like you would for someone who has a food stain on their shirt or food in their teeth, as if to say, 'Your fashion sense is so offensive I'm assuming it's some sort of accident you'll want to fix.”

“I seem to be able to get away with pun strips if I add a panel at the end where I somehow indicate that I know it's a bad pun.”

“Perhaps it is a secret yearning of all Hallmark employees to use the phrase 'you big fat pain in the butt' in an anniversary card.”

“Man, I put myself in a lot of comic strips. Something's wrong with my sense of self.”

“I'm very harsh on real estate agents. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because of how the call every small house 'charming' and every run-down house a 'great fixer-upper'. Just once, I'd like them to show me a house and declare, 'This one's a piece of crap'.”

“When I was at the University of California at Berkeley, I went to some classes that must have had more than four hundred students in them. I almost always sat in the far back of the auditorium so I could read the newspaper. I remember that I stayed late one day to ask the professor a question, and when I got up to him, all I could think to myself was, 'So this is what the professor looks like.”

“When I say 'friends,' I use that term loosely, as I don't actually have any.”

“When you can't draw chameleons and you can't draw blenders, it's a bad idea to write strips where chameleons become blenders.”

“The phrase 'I just turn on my monkey and it makes me feel good' sounds very dirty, but I can't explain why. It's great to try to use expressions like that on the comics page. People want to complain but they can't, because they can't figure out quite what they should be complaining about.”

“Having a syndicated comic strip is a great platform for ripping on expressions you hate.”

“On the list of things I cannot draw, wedding dresses are right there next to cars.”

“Scott Adams: From him, I learned how to write a three-panel comic. Probably the best pure writer on the comics page.”

“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.”

“Everyone cites [Charles Schulz], but it’s with good reason. He taught me timing, tone, character development, practically everything.”

“Most poetry just confounds me. I really want to like it, but I can't help thinking it's a hoax. (p. 24)”