Gary Larson Quotes

I don't believe in the concept of hell, but if I did I would think of it as filled with people who were cruel to animals.

Welcome to Hell. Here's your accordion.

You always hear a headline like this, 'Man Killed By Shark', you never hear it from the other perspective, 'Man Swims in Shark Infested Waters, Forgets He's Shark Food'.

I don't know where my ideas come from. I will admit, however, that one key ingredient is caffeine. I get a couple cups of coffee into me and weird things just start to happen.

If a tree falls in the woods, and nobody is around to hear it, and it hits a mime, does anyone care?

It is a known fact that the sheep that give us steel wool have no natural enemies.

Wait a minute! This is grass! We've been eating grass!

Gary Larson: The funniest cartoonist I’ve ever seen. His two-volume set (The Complete Far Side) should be the textbook in any course taught on how to be funny on the comics page.

My drafting table, where I drew The Far Side for most of my career, faced a window that overlooked a beautiful garden; beyond the garden was a lake, and beyond the lake Mount Rainier rose majestically into the Washington sky. I worked at night.

M’ha vingut al cap aquella vinyeta d’en Gary Larson, aquella de les vaques que peten la xerrada a peu dret i fumen enmig d’un camp. De sobte, una crida: «Ei, dissimuleu, que ve un altre cotxe!». –I qui coi és, en Gary Larson? –És igual. Deixa-ho córrer.

Now this end is called the Thogomizer... after the late Thog Simmons.

Look out, everyone! ... We're being attacked by a giant sq ... well, no ... I'd say medium squid!

On my list of things to be when I grew up was a character in a Gary Larson comic. With one of his books in my hands, I would spend hours and hours laughing. And then I’d finally stop laughing long enough to actually open the book. I’m not sure what the younger me would think about me if he could see me now. To be honest, I’m not sure he’d be terribly impressed. He’d probably put his hands on his hips and hump his dismay.

College students were asked to rate the humor of cartoons from Gary Larson’s The Far Side while holding a pencil in their mouth. Those who were “smiling” (without any awareness of doing so) found the cartoons funnier than did those who were “frowning.” In another experiment, people whose face was shaped into a frown (by squeezing their eyebrows together) reported an enhanced emotional response to upsetting pictures—starving children, people arguing, maimed accident victims.

I actually find a lot of parallels in jazz and cartooning.

All we are is a species, like millions of others. I think it's dangerous to think otherwise.

a toy poodle puppy, “like all good parents, we went out and read a book about how to raise a dog,” Jay tells me. The book claimed that dog names should ideally have two syllables and hard consonants. The Neitzes brainstormed a few options, and Maureen, in joking reference to Jay’s research on vision, suggested Retina. (I point out that Retina has three syllables. “Yes, but our version has two,” Jay says. “Ret-na.”) Black, fluffy, and very cute, Retina became a part of history. She was one of the dogs who first confirmed what colors dogs actually see. In the 1980s, when the Neitzes were getting their PhDs, many people believed that dogs were color-blind. In The Far Side, cartoonist Gary Larson drew a dog praying at its bedside for “Mom, Dad, Rex, Ginger, Tucker, me, and all the rest of the family to see color.” Scientists bought into this myth, too: One textbook claimed that “on the whole, mammals appear not to have color vision except for the primates

If you're gonna shoot an elephant Mr. Schneider, you better be prepared to finish the job.

A chimpanzee named Frodo has impregnated his own mother, killed a human infant, attacked cartoonist Gary Larson, and beat the head of primatology, Jane Goodall, so badly that he almost broke her neck.

Every one of these cartoons is just something that drifted into my head when I was alone with my thoughts. And, for better or worse, I 'jotted' them down. It was only later, when perhaps I received an angry letter from someone, that it struck me: Hey! Someone's been reading my diary!

Simultaneously all three went for the ball, and the coconut-like sound of their heads colliding secretly delighted the bird.

I am disappointed that you have replaced some good, old-fashioned and humorous cartoons with distasteful ones. For example, "The Far Side" by Gary Larson is not funny, just lacking in good taste. "Calvin and Hobbes" by Watterson could be more acceptable if made less offensive (at times). "Doonesbury" and "Bloom County," I suppose, reflect our times. Far better for our newspaper to be working to change what is so unacceptable to us all in these times. Many other cartoons are funny, likable and reflective of the real and good in our country. -- Mary Kohler, Yonkers (letter published in the Herald Statesman, Yonkers NY, 11/12/86) Quoted in /The Bloom County Library/