Top 201 Quotes & Sayings by Matt Groening - Page 4

I'm better than dirt. Well, most kinds of dirt, not that fancy store-bought dirt... I can't compete with that stuff.

Today is the first day of the rest of your short, brutish existence as a sentient creature before being snuffed out into utter nothingness for all eternity.

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. They're printing the comics so small that most strips are just talking heads, and if you look back at the glory days of comic strips, you can see that they were showcases for some of the best pop art ever to come out.

For some reason, a lot of Hollywood big shots are curious to see how they'd be drawn with bulging eyes and no chin.

Anxiety and hostility seem to be a great part of good and bad humor. Examining humor too closely does seem to destroy it.

I have to say that The Simpsons comes from a huge number of great writers headed by Al Jean, the show-runner, and the work that they do is really fantastic. It's a blast just to sit around with them in the writers' room and listen to all the filthy jokes that will never get on the air.

A lot of American shows don't last for as long as 12 episodes. They get cut after one. But certainly one of the great things about The Office in particular was that there was a beginning, a middle and an end.

I was very disturbed when Jesus found a demon in a guy, and he put the demon in a herd of pigs, then sent them off a cliff. What did the pigs do? I could never figure that out. It just seemed very un-Christian. Technically, I'm an agnostic, but I definitely believe in hell -- especially after watching the fall TV schedule.

Lisa: 'Do we have any food that wasn't brutally slaughtered?' Homer: 'Well, I think the veal died of loneliness.'

The amazing thing about Freak Out! was that there was nothing quite like it in rock 'n roll at the time. It was really simultaneously crude and ugly, and incredibly sophisticated. The Beatles were funny, but there was nothing with the kind of sneer that you could feel in the music of Frank Zappa.

Buy Space Ghost cereal, but don't eat the prizes.

Oh, loneliness and cheeseburgers are a dangerous mix.

Let's face it, all the good stuff happens after midnight.

You just have to keep in mind that the important relationship is the relationship with the audience. That's what I try to do. Everything else is secondary.

If at first you don't succeed - give it up. It isn't worth the pain.

Being a good embalmer is a thankless job.

I personally like the idea of newspapers. It's a good format. You can read it in whatever order you want. You can glance at it. There is something about a single screen and scrolling through pages that just doesn't have the same appeal.

Me fail English? That's unpossible.

I think human beings probably resonate with audiences more than bunnies, but who knows?

The Simpsons and Futurama are such big projects, going on for years and working in different media, that everything involved with them, promotion and merchandise and online presence and all the rest, deserve to be scrutinized, so that's part of it. I have a great deal of sympathy for anyone at the core of a multimedia juggernaut, even if you might not care for the specific pop-culture invasion of your brain. The people who do it work really hard.

Keep your expectations tiny you'll go through life not so whiney.