List of Jules Feiffer Quotes

I Think We Overrate Experience And What We've Been Through In Terms Of Our Success At Doing The Work We Do. There Are Many People Who Get Beat Up, Who Suffer, Who Are Victimized, And Then They Sit Down To Write And They Write Crap.

Kids Are In Ongoing Need Of Support, And They Get Various Versions Of It From Grownups Which Aren't Legitimate - A Grownup's Version Of What We Think You Should Have. We Tell You What Creativity Is, And We Even Tell You What You're Thinking.

I'm Well Beyond Dyslexic: I Have No Sense Of Direction; I Never Know Where I Am.

I Have No Sense Of Direction; I Never Know Where I Am. When I Back Up A Car, I'm More Likely To Hit What's Behind Me Than Not, Because I Have No Vision For It. I've Never Been Able To Play Games Or Play Cards Because I Can't In My Head Get The Next Move. I've Never Been Able To Balance A Checkbook. So There's Some Brain Damage, But It May Be That Very Brain Damage That Allows Me To Do The Work I Do. I've Never Met A Cartoonist Who Isn't Quirky Or Weird In Some Ways.

There's The Excitement Of Adding Color, Which I Didn't Know Anything About Until 1997 Or So, When I Did My First Picture Book. So, The Kid's Book In Particular Have Been Exciting For Me Because It Forced Me To Go Back To The Work I Loved As A Young Boy Reading Sunday's Supplements And Comics In The Sunday Papers When I Was Six, Seven, Eight, Nine. And Number Of Which Have Been In Wonderful Collections, Beautifully Reproduced.

My Success Was The Shock Of Recognition, Probably, Rather Than The Quality Of The Work. I Mean, The Quality May Have Been Fine, But There's A Lot Of Fine Work Out There. It Was The Fact That I Was Doing Something That At That Time, Nobody Else Was Doing, Except For Say, Mort Saul Out In San Francisco On The Hungry Eye, And "second City" Was Emerging Out In Chicago. Nothing In Print. It Was Basically Happening In Cabaret And Nothing In Fiction. And Certainly Nothing In New York In Cartoons.

I'm Not Sure About That Role Any Longer. The Role Used To Be To Mix Things Up And I Think To A Great Extent It Still Is, But The Quality Of The Work Of The Political Cartoon Has Been Succeeded By The Wisecrack, The Gag Cartoon, So That The Cartoonist Becomes More Of The Equivalent Of The Jay Leno Monologues, Or David Letterman Monologues.

I've Been Around A Long Time And I've Found That These Forms, Whether It's The Cartoon, Or Whether It's A Play, Or All These Dying Forms Refuse To Die. Something Happens To Rejuvenate Them And It Will Certainly Happen To The Political Cartoon. It Will Come Back. But Whether It's On The Internet, Or Whether It's In Some Other Form, However That Works, Whether It Looks The Way It Looks Now, Or Entirely Different, I Have No Idea. And Thank God I Don't Have To Worry About It.

At The Time, Liberals Didn't Understand That They Had First Amendment Rights. So, I Was Doing Cartoons In This Narrative Cartoon Form About Subject Surrounding That And As I Was Turned Down By Editor After Editor At Each Publishing House, I Began To Notice On Their Desks This New Newspaper Called The Village Voice, Which I Then Went And Picked Up And Thought, Well My God, These Editors That Were Turning Me Down All, Whom Tell Me How Much They Like My Stuff, But They Don't Know How To Market It Because Nobody Knows Who I Am. If I Got Into This Paper, They Would Know Who I Am.

I Come Out Of A Cold War Sensibility, A Cold War Mentality, And During Those Cold War Years, I Used To Know, I Thought, The Answers To Everything. And Since The End Of The Cold War, I'm Just A Dumb As Everyone Else.

I Found It Was My Good Fortune To Somehow Be Able To Work In These Forms That I Loved When I Was A Kid. I Love Movies And I Could Write Screenplays. I Love Theater And I Could Write Plays. I Mean, They Would Be My Own, I Could Never Write What Was Used To Be Called The Well-made Play. But My First Play, "little Murders," Turned Out To Be A Great Success And A Great Influence On Plays At That Time.

I'm Not Electronically Geared At All; I'm Really A 19th Century Cartoonist. I Have A 15-year-old Daughter, And What She's Attracted To Is Of Course Ipod And This Pod And That, I Mean Stuff I Don't Even Begin To Know - I Never Learned How To Type For Christ's Sake! I Can't Get In Her Head And Find Out What She Would Do If She Had The Kind Of Talent I Had, I Don't Have A Clue. Every Generation Comes Up With Its Own Quirkiness And Its Own Culture Which Gets Its Inspiration From What's In The Air At That Time.