Quotes by Stephan Pastis

When I say friends, I use that term loosely, as I dont actually have any.

Whenever I see people with their collars up, Im 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 Im assuming its some sort of accident youll want to fix.

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 dont really know what that means, but I am now more careful handling needles.

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.

If somebody is not on the same page with me humor wise, I cant give them that.

Brits have a better sense of humor in most ways. Its darker, more cutting.

Maybe the bar is low, but most of the strips that are 50, 60, 70 years old that are on their second or third generation of artists, the humor is pretty bland. There are others by people that were raised on Family Guy or South Park that are edgier. Mines not as edgy as those, but its edgier than Beetle Bailey.

Thomas, my 15-year-old, is effectively my editor, Ive always trusted his voice, more than anybody, on the strip for years. He has one of those ears thats just tuned to the rhythm of humor, so if he says somethings not funny, my stomach just hurts because I know hes right, and its already been drawn.

You can write a little and can draw a little, but theres necessarily a limitation on both in a comic strip, since it appears in such a tiny space.

You cant just count on becoming a syndicated cartoonist. I actually tried to calculate the odds once, and the best I could come up with is a 1-in-36,000 chance. And the odds of getting hit by lightning are 1 in 7,900 - which kind of shows how long those odds are.