Top 96 Cartoonists Quotes & Sayings

Let's not let cartoonists get involved in a war of any kind, except for a war against stupidity.

Both of my parents were cartoonists - they met in art school - so I was always drawing and I was the best artist in my class and all that stuff.

Carl Barks and Don Rosa are two of my favorite cartoonists ever.

I've said this before, but I think one of the reason so many of the cartoonists I know have become friends is because the Internet is a much more cooperative space.

Cartoonists' dirty secret is that we tend to come up with stories that involve things that are really fun to draw.

I do worry that beginning cartoonists could feel somewhat strangled by the increasing critical seriousness comics has received of late and feel, like younger writers, that they have to have something to "say" before they set pen to paper. Many cartoonists feel even more passionate about this idea than I do, vehemently insisting that comics are inherently "non-art" and poop humor or whatever it is they think it is, but that attitude is a little like insisting that all modern writing should always take the form of The Canterbury Tales.

We need more cartoonists to truly retire when they retire, and not run repeats.

Cartoonists are untrained artists, while illustrators are more trained.

Political cartoonists get hung up on daily deadlines and the front page. The worst thing you can do is open up the newspaper and ask, 'What's funny about this?'

I'm working so much I don't see the work of many young cartoonists so it's hard for me to tell which are my favourites. Maybe when I get to stick my head out of the sand I'll be able to let you know.

There is too much illustrating of the news these days. I look at many editorial cartoons and I don't know what the cartoonists are saying or how they feel about a certain issue.

Old cartoonists never retire, they just erase away.

Like a lot of freelance cartoonists, when any opportunity like that comes along, I have a hard time saying no, whether it makes sense or not.

At that time, the people that were in the animated film business were mostly guys who were unsuccessful newspaper cartoonists. In other words, their ability to draw living things was practically nil.

Cartooning is a wonderful career, and I'd like more women to get to have it. I can't think of any reason why we won't see more syndicated female cartoonists in the future.

I'd love to see more equal representation of female and male cartoonists on the comics page.

One of the perks of being a New Yorker cartoonist is that you get to hang around with interesting people. My fellow cartoonists are all interesting, and all highly creative.

There has always been quite a strong black and white art tradition in Australia, with quite a large contingent of cartoonists, given the size of the population.

There are definitely times - and I think this is pretty common among cartoonists - where you spend an entire day trying to think of an idea, and you're like, 'I give up.' And then you go and take a shower or run an errand, and halfway there, you get an idea.

The digital realm give cartoons and cartoonists more possibilities for exposure.

There's all kinds of theories among the cartoonists: start with funniest, end with funniest.

As for the cartoonists 'Oily' prints, they are just artists I admire. I am lucky to be friends with most of them so it was easy to contact them. Some have come to me but mainly they are just folks that I admire.

I always idealized the mainstream cartoonists and the packed schedule they worked under.

I've always said that what cartoonists do is create friends for readers.

E.C. Segar, who created 'Thimble Theatre' and 'Popeye,' is one of my favorite cartoonists.

I am not one to generalize, but cartoonists, as a group, exhibit a level of social sophistication generally associated with pie fights. In high school, when the future lawyers were campaigning for class president, the future cartoonists were painstakingly altering illustrations in their history books so that Robert E. Lee appeared to be performing an illegal act with his horse.

I'm a better editorial cartoonist by default because so many editorial cartoonists out there are so awful.

I was the founder of the Cartoon Bank in the 90s. I was interested in finding ways for cartoonists to supplement their incomes.

Alternative cartoonists have to rely on comic book stores to get their stuff in the hands of readers.

Perspective was always important. There are some cartoonists who can stand at the foot of a building looking straight up and they'll capture it perfectly. And then there are those of us who do the same drawing and it's the goofiest-looking thing in the world. But after a while I guess you just learn what you're capable of and what you can and can't do.

Student cartoonists as well as professionals should always be careful that they're not doing a cartoon that already has been done.

I never studied art, but taught myself to draw by imitating the New Yorker cartoonists of that day, instead of doing my homework.

I can definitely say that of all my friends who I consider to be really great cartoonists, we're all trying to aim at basically the same thing, which is an ever closer representation of what it feels like to be alive.

Well, there are better cartoonists now than there ever have been. I firmly believe that. There's some amazing work being done.

I was never asked to join the Editorial Cartoonists Of America. No fraternity would have me in college, either. I think they know something.

There are two ways to look at my publishing career. One is that I'm a novelist churning out books, who is eight into a series; the other way is that I'm a cartoonist, just starting out. Most cartoonists have long careers: Charles Schulz drew Peanuts for 50 years.

Such is the nature of comic strips. Once established, their half-life is usually more than nuclear waste. Typically, the end result is lazy, rich cartoonists.

If political cartoonists continue to rely on newspapers, we may be in serious trouble. It's a very transferable form of journalism, though - it works great on Web sites.

Terrorism really doesn't strike at physical structures as much as it strikes at ideas, and its main fear is ideas. And cartoonists are particularly effective at distilling ideas.

I operate under the assumption that the mass media will never be accurate. ... It operates with the objective to simplify and exaggerate, which is exactly what Walt Disney told his cartoonists.

What I do know is that Charlie Hebdo cartoonists have been converted into the closest thing the West has to religious-like martyrs in the war against radical Islam, which means that anything short of pure reverence for them generates tribal rage and vilification.

Before World War II, I was living a very cloistered existence, as most cartoonists do. The work I was pouring out did not come from any real, personal life experience; this was all the residue of the accumulation of Rafael Sabatini, O. Henry, all the short-story writers that I'd been reading.

My drawing, like that of most cartoonists, is intended first of all to be functional: to create believable space, and communicate information. My strongest point in drawing has always been my ability to show characters' nonverbal communication through facial expression and posture.

Our visual cortexes are wired to quickly recognize faces and then quickly subtract massive amounts of detail from them, zeroing in on their essential message: Is this person happy? Angry? Fearful? Individual faces may vary greatly, but a smirk on one is a lot like a smirk on another. Smirks are conceptual, not pictorial. Our brains are like cartoonists - and cartoonists are like our brains, simplifying and exaggerating, subordinating facial detail to abstract comic concepts.

All cartoonists are geniuses, but Arnold Roth is especially so.

When I was a kid, I desperately wanted more background information on especially cartoonists.

I take inspirations from newspaper strip cartoonists who look for ways of expanding their characters' worlds once they have established the initial concept of their strips.

I'd like to see cartoonists measuring their work by higher standards than how many papers their strips are in and how much money they make.

If you just write the kinds of stories you think others will want to read, you'll be competing with cartoonists who are far more enthusiastic for that kind of comic than you are, and they'll kick your ass every time.

I was the founder of the 'Cartoon Bank' in the '90s. I was interested in finding ways for cartoonists to supplement their incomes.

Cartoonists create so many cartoons on any given topic that we can follow the life cycle of a comic idea and how it evolves over time more quickly than we can with a form like the novel.

So many cartoonists draw the same year after year. When they find a style, they stick with it. They don't mess with innovation, and they become boring.

I thought how proud I am to be standing up beside my dad. Never did it occur to me that he would become the gist for cartoonists.

There may be this hidden, hate-filled community of online cartoonists, but if there are, I haven't found it yet. We're all generally pretty nice people, it turns out!

Professional humorists and cartoonists have to go through a stage in which they have to kill their own internal editor just so they can get stuff out. So whether they believe it or not, they need me on the other end to do that editing for them.

Too often cartoonists just look at other cartoonists and, after a lot of inbreeding, everyone has the same funny look. The challenge of drawing is that there is no one right way to visually describe something. It's a good thing to confront your limitations and preconceptions every so often.

There are a lot of really great cartoonists out there. It's nice to be thought of as one of them.

Orrin Hatch was the keynote speaker at the last meeting of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. He sought me out because he was a fan. I was thinking he had confused me with someone else.

'Cartoonists' dirty secret is that we tend to come up with stories that involve things that are really fun to draw.

The art editor in charge of the covers at the 'New Yorker' is Francoise Mouly. She's very familiar with the eccentricities and personalities of cartoonists, so working with her is very easy.