Alison Bechdel Quotes

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.

- Alison Bechdel

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.

- Alison Bechdel

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

- Alison Bechdel

I get a lot of mail from men who really identify with Stuart, you know, Sparrow's boyfriend. I love that. Even though I used to say I wanted men to read the strip even though there weren't any men in it, so they'd be forced to identify with the women.

- Alison Bechdel

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.

- Alison Bechdel

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.

- Alison Bechdel

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

- Alison Bechdel

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

- Alison Bechdel

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

- Alison Bechdel

When I grew up, I studied karate for years. I got pretty strong, but eventually I had to acknowledge that I really didn't like fighting at all, so I quit.

- Alison Bechdel

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

- Alison Bechdel

My mother is, my father certainly was. They were kind of the local intelligentsia in the town where I grew up.

- Alison Bechdel

One of them is already having some menopausal symptoms. I'm working on that. I'm giving them all little lines under the eyes, trying to sort of make them age gracefully.

- Alison Bechdel

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

- Alison Bechdel

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

- Alison Bechdel

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

- Alison Bechdel

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

- Alison Bechdel

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

- Alison Bechdel

Writing this book feels like a completely different activity from writing my comic strip because it's about real life. I feel like I'm using a part of my brain that's been dormant until now.

- Alison Bechdel

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

- Alison Bechdel

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

- Alison Bechdel

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

- Alison Bechdel

It's definitely part of it, that the men were having fun and doing the interesting things but also, I don't know, I'm just thinking more about gender and how maybe in some way I am more of a boy than a girl.

- Alison Bechdel

I hope that I can get people to read it without having to change it. Especially now that the strip has more different kinds of characters. It's really not all lesbians any more.

- Alison Bechdel

That's all true, but there was something else going on for me as a kid, something about my gender identity that I haven't figured out yet. And that's one of the things I'm hoping to dissect and investigate in this memoir project.

- Alison Bechdel

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

- Alison Bechdel

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

- Alison Bechdel

People really want to think that these things really happened. I don't know why that 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.

- Alison Bechdel

Sometimes I wish the writing and drawing were more integrated.

- Alison Bechdel

Autobiographical comics, I love them. I love them.

- Alison Bechdel

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

- Alison Bechdel

I never really read superhero stuff as a kid.

- Alison Bechdel

But mostly, it's a book about my relationship with my father.

- Alison Bechdel