Explore Quotes by Roz Chast

The wonderful thing about the cartoon form is it's a combination of words and pictures. You don't have to choose, and the contribution of the two often winds up being greater than the sum of its parts.

Sometimes, you know - I think, with a lot of things, at the time, everything is extremely upsetting, and then you look back on it, and it actually can be sort of funny.

I don't like going into the basement. I'm always afraid that something's going to blow up.

I love detail, like drawing what's on top of someone's coffee table. Maybe there's a little bowl of butterscotch candies on it, next to the four TV remotes.

I had to get good grades and do well in school - my mother was an assistant principal and my father was a teacher - and they took this very seriously.

My works were not - and they still aren't - single panel gags with a punch line underneath them. I like a lot of those cartoons; I just don't draw them.

I cannot stand superheroes. I do not understand any of its appeal. It has just bored me to death since I was a little kid.

Grime is not like messiness or some fingerprints on a cabinet; it takes a long time to accumulate.

I don't like anything that looks gelatinous - really weirds me out. But when I was a kid, I used to get very, very upset if anything had a kind of chalky texture; like, certain kinds of cottage cheese I know have a weird chalkiness.

I'm sure that my parents' behavior has entered my work, I'm sorry to say. I don't think you need to have a difficult childhood to be funny, but it helps.

I can't even look at daily comic strips. And I hate sitcoms because they don't seem like real people to me: they're props that often say horrible things to each other, which I don't find funny. I have to feel like they're real people.

I've done a lot of death cartoons - tombstones, Grim Reaper, illness, obituaries... I'm not great at analyzing things, but my guess is that maybe the only relief from the terror of being alive is jokes.

I sometimes suffer from insomnia. And when I can't fall asleep, I play what I call the alphabet game.

When my father died, my mother was still alive. And I think when your second parent dies, there is that shock: 'Oh man, I'm an orphan.' There's also this relief: It's done; it's finished; it's over.

My kids always joked that I spent more time cooking the birds' food than I have cooking for them. And it's probably true.

My life is so boring that your brains are going to melt and come out of your eyes.

My parents were fine at 85. So 85's nothing. 100 is another thing. I have a friend whose mother is about to turn 101, and it's not great.

I don't think any of my kids' books talk down to kids.

I think, with my cartoons, the parent-like figures are kind of my own archeypes of parents, and they're taken a little bit from my parents and other people's parents, and parents I have read about, and parents I dreamed about, and parents that I made up.

Childhood - that was not my favorite time in my life.

It cracks me up to see these ads for TV - for Depends or for glue for your dentures. The people in them look 55 with a hint of gray. Where are the people who are falling apart? We don't see that.