Quotes

The most difficult character for me is Zonker. He's much more of a free spirit than I am.

America is the only country in the world where failing to publicize yourself is considered arrogant.

Having a successful daily comic strip is the closest thing to tenure that popular culture offers. But it doesn't seem to have freed up creativity any more than tenure for professors has. It's been an open invitation for complacency.

When I talk to wounded veterans, I usually don't ask them what they think the mission was. I don't presume, because their lives are wrenching enough without the suggestion that their sacrifices may have been without meaning. Moreover, if that is so, it will become apparent to them soon enough . . . The young men and women who we've repeatedly put in harm's way are paying the price for this misbegotten mission, and as long as it continues, I, like so many of our countrymen, must walk this strange line between hating the war but honoring the warrior. I don't know how long we can keep it up. . .

"I think he is smart but willfully ignorant, and he uses his ignorance for strategic advantage, which is appalling. He substitutes belief for thought. It protects you from self-doubt" -- Trudeau's opinion of President George W. Bush.

[on his continued satirizing of Donald Trump] You can't make this stuff up, so why try? Some people feel that Trump is beyond satire, but we professionals know he IS satire, pure and uncut, free for all to use and enjoy, and for that we are not ungrateful. For our country, though, we can only weep.

Traditionally, satire has comforted the afflicted while afflicting the comfortable. Satire punches up, against authority of all kinds, the little guy against the powerful. Great French satirists like Molière and Daumier always punched up, holding up the self-satisfied and hypocritical to ridicule. Ridiculing the non-privileged is almost never funny-it's just mean.

[on Donald Trump's attacks on Doonesbury over the years] The earliest strips, mocking Trump's first presidential trial balloon, began in the fall of 1987. 'People tell me I should be flattered,' he told Newsweek. But as there was nothing remotely flattering about the portrayal, he soon became confused, then irritated, all the more as I was drawing him in a way that suggested I didn't know how good-looking he was. By the end of the week, it was game on - Trump had someone new to wail on, and I had a new recurring character, one whose real-life counterpart could be counted on to react in real time.

[on his controversial 2012 strip on abortion] I chose the topic of compulsory sonograms because it was in the news and because of its relevance to the broader battle over women's health currently being waged in several states. For some reason, the GOP has chosen 2012 to re-litigate reproductive freedom, an issue that was resolved decades ago. Why Santorum, Limbaugh and others thought this would be a good time to declare war on half the electorate, I cannot say. But to ignore it would have been comedy malpractice.