Matt Groening

“'The Simpsons' from the very beginning was based on our memories of brash '60s sitcoms - you had a main title theme that was bombastic and grabbed your attention - and when you look at TV sh...”

“I had been drawing my weekly comic strip, 'Life in Hell,' for about five years when I got a call from Jim Brooks, who was developing 'The Tracey Ullman Show' for the brand-new Fox network. H...”

“Cartooning is for people who can't quite draw and can't quite write. You combine the two half-talents and come up with a career.”

“People go into cartooning because they're shy and they're angry. That's when you're sitting in the back of a classroom drawing the teacher.”

“My father was a really sharp cartoonist and filmmaker. He used to tape-record the family surreptitiously, either while we were driving around or at dinner, and in 1963 he and I made up a sto...”

“I went through a phase where people would introduce me at parties as a cartoonist, and everybody felt sorry for me. 'Oh, Matt's a cartoonist.' Then people further feeling sorry for me would...”

“I thought I was going to make crazy cartoons for the rest of my life. I didn't think I'd ever get paid for it, didn't think I drew well enough, but I knew it made me happy.”

“I know for a fact, obviously, because my kids grew up watching the show, that there are some things they are introduced to from 'The Simpsons', and then later in life they see the thing we'r...”

“The best stories in our culture have some sort of subversiveness - Mark Twain, 'Catcher in the Rye.' You provide kids with great stories and teach them how to use the tools to make their own...”

“Oftentimes, what seems to be a street lunatic charging at me spouting gibberish turns out to be a devoted 'Simpsons' fan quoting their favorite line.”

“With Charlie Brown, it was about loneliness and isolation. I always thought that the thing about Charlie Brown and those characters was the absence of the parents. Half the strip was about w...”

“'The Simpsons' is an especially collaborative show.”

“I like all of the early relationship strips that were collected in 'Love Is Hell,' where I pretended to be an expert in relationships and did comics like 'The Nine Types of Boyfriends,' 'Six...”

“I draw a weekly comic strip called Life in Hell, which is syndicated in about 250 newspapers. That's what I did before The Simpsons, and what I plan to do for the rest of my life.”

“Sometimes people try to read into my strip and find out what my state of mind is. And I can say if I'm in a good mood, generally the comic strip starts out in a good mood, but the punchline...”

“Charles Schultz is a really interesting case. He wrote that comic strip and drew it himself from beginning to end, and it's a work of genius. It's very simply drawn, but it has some really d...”

“I think in daily newspapers, the way comic strips are treated, it's as if newspaper publishers are going out of their way to kill the medium.”

“A lot of our writers, like Conan O'Brien, moved on to other things.”

“Everybody doesn't have to get every joke. People really appreciate not being condescended to.”

“I love the idea that we put in jokes the kids don't get. And that later, when they grow up and read a few books and go to college and watch the show again, they can get it on a completely di...”