Alison bechdel quotes

You can't live and write at the same time.

I still found literary criticism to be a suspect activity

She has given me a way out.

Basically, my work is play. It never actually feels that way - I'm always aiming to attain that state. But I get to do for a living what I did as a child for fun, and that's pretty cool.

The writing is hard, and the drawing is fun. It's very satisfying to see a drawing start to come together.

When I was growing up in the 1960s, there was starting to be more books geared towards young adults.

At first I was glad for the help. My freshmen English class, "Mythology and Archetypal Experience," confounded me. I didn't understand why we couldn't just read books without forcing contorted interpretations on then

People really want to think that these things really happened. I don't know why that is important, but I know that when I finish reading a novel or something, I want to know how much of that really happened to this author.

Well, I'm always working on my comic strip and trying to, you know, keep cranking that out.

I do sometimes miss doing that lighter, more humorous work, and I find there's a heavier responsibility that goes along with a literary reputation. You have to start knowing what you're talking about and you have to go have public conversations with writers. That's been pretty intense; I have to really stay on top of things in a way I didn't before.

Sometimes I wish the writing and drawing were more integrated.

I suppose that a lifetime spent hiding one's erotic truth could have a cumulative renunciatory effect. Sexual shame is in itself a kind of death.

I'm pretty illiterate when it comes to comics history.

It was not a triumphal return. Home, as I had known it, was gone.

Although I am good at enumerating my father’s flaws, it’s hard for me to sustain much anger at him. I expect this is partly because he’s dead, and partly because the bar is lower for fathers than it is for mothers.

The satiric ethos of Mad was a much bigger childhood influence.

I could not do what I do if I were not obsessive compulsive to a certain extent. I don't act clinically OCD. I'm not going to check things so many times I have to take drugs for it. But the kind of complicated and painstaking work I have to do to make my drawings, it just kind of harnesses that compulsive energy in a constructive way.

I'm not that good of a drawer. I don't know how people just draw stuff out of their head. I'm always creating schemes. If I have to draw someone sitting in a chair, I have to go find a chair, sit in it, and take a picture of myself sitting in it.

I’m glad mainstream culture is starting to catch up to where lesbian-feminism was 30 years ago.

Drawing is more fun to me than writing. I think it's interesting to talk to different cartoonists about how those activities work for them. I'm a very writerly cartoonist. I certainly spend more time on the writing than I do on the drawing, even though the drawing, of course, is very time-consuming.

Yeah, I read Judy Blume. My mother didn't like that, but I read it anyhow.

Mostly it was Mad magazine. And I did read a lot of - I had a subscription when I was little, but I also had access to some old collections, the little paperbacks of the really good stuff.

I love Jules Feiffer. I didn't discover him until I was a little older.

Nancy Drew was always changing her outfits. I despised girls' clothing, I couldn't wait to get home from school and get out of it. The last thing I wanted to read was minute descriptions of Nancy's frocks.

But I read comic books. I read things like Richie Rich and Little Lulu.

Bechdel Test, was named for the comic strip it came from, penned by Alison Bechdel - but Bechdel credits a friend named Liz Wallace, so maybe it really should be called the Liz Wallace Test...? Anyway, the test is much simpler than the name. To pass it your movie must have the following: a) there are at least two named female characters, who b) talk to each other about c) something other than a man.

I probably read Harriet the Spy about 70,000 times.

Watching everyone root through their psyche, it just delights me. Especially R. Crumb's stuff.

I tend to write first thing, and then do my drawing later. I like to draw at night. But often I go for long stretches without drawing, because I'm trying to figure out what I'm writing.

And partly, the worst thing you could do in my family was need something from someone. So physical strength represented an avenue of self-sufficiency to me.

If there was ever a bigger pansy than my father, it was Marcel Proust.

It's a hard thing to age a character because you can't really suddenly give someone gray hair.

The secret subversive goal of my work is to show that women, not just lesbians, are regular human beings.

I don't know, maybe it's because I was raised Catholic. Confession has always held a great appeal for me.

Grief takes many forms, including the absence of grief

Self-published media are really critical. It's so heartwarming that people are still doing it in this digital age. It's just really moving and exciting. You can't really replace a beautiful little mini-comic. It doesn't translate to the computer, you know? Handmade stuff has really given me hope for humanity.

I just met someone who read Gone With the Wind 62 times for exactly that same reason. She couldn't bear that it wasn't real. She wanted to live in it.

For some reason writing and drawing are very separate processes for me.

If it weren't for the unconventionality of my desires, my mind might never have been forced to reckon with my body.

I grew to resent the way my father treated his furniture like children, and his children like furniture.

Autobiographical comics, I love them. I love them.

Even drawing gray hair at all is difficult to render in black and white.

It certainly was an important moment for me, that realization that I was not going to get what I wanted. It was very freeing. I keep using that word "freeing" or "liberating." I feel like Houdini sometimes, like I'm just getting out of one set of shackles after another, hanging upside down inside a burlap bag with handcuffs on. Hopefully one day, I'm going to get out of this tank of water.

I don't know how anyone gets anything done in New York City. I vastly prefer living in the country. I just need a lot of quiet and solitude, and I'm so easily distracted. I mean, the Internet is enough to deal with.

My father once nearly came to blows with a female dinner guest about whether a particular patch of embroidery was fuchsia or magenta. But the infinite gradations of color in a fine sunset - from salmon to canary to midnight blue - left him wordless.

I just have this sort of entrepreneurial spirit and I work really hard at promoting myself.

It's imprecise and insufficient, defining the homosexual as a person whose gender expression is at odds with his or her sex.

The web is my unconscious but it's also a wish -- a fantasy of what my own creativity might look like if I weren't constantly impeding its flow.

I try not to have anything too much going on between waking up and getting to work. I like to just be really fresh when I sit down. I always have my best ideas, like, within five minutes of starting. And then the rest of the day is just kind of putting in time.

I wish I had a typical workday. I struggle to get up at seven and almost always fail. I just try to get to my office as soon as I can, but it's always later than I would like.

In a narcissistic cathexis, you invest more energy into your ideas about another person than in the actual, objective, external person. So the man who falls in love with beauty is quite different from the man who loves a girl and feels she is beautiful and can see what is beautiful about her.

I'll watch a movie only if it meets the following criteria: 1. It has to have at least two women in it. 2. Who talk to each other. 3. About something besides a man.

Who embalms the Undertaker when he dies?

I never really read superhero stuff as a kid.

I started to get bored with that stuff about only drawing men and I've taken it out of the slideshow.

Partly I resented being perceived as weak because I was a girl.

It's our very capacity for self-consciousness that makes us self-destructive!

I'd been upstaged, demoted from protagonist in my own drama to comic relief in my parents' tragedy

It was a vicious cycle, though. The more gratification we found in our own geniuses, the more isolated we grew.

Was Daedalus really stricken with grief when Icarus fell into the sea? Or just disappointed by the design failure

What would happen if we spoke the truth?

I get to do for a living what I did as a child for fun, and that's pretty cool.