And partly, the worst thing you could do in my family was need something from someone. So physical strength represented an avenue of self-sufficiency to me.
Alison Bechdel

Autobiographical comics, I love them. I love them.
Alison Bechdel

But I read comic books. I read things like Richie Rich and Little Lulu.
Alison Bechdel

But mostly, it's a book about my relationship with my father.
Alison Bechdel

Even drawing gray hair at all is difficult to render in black and white.
Alison Bechdel

For some reason writing and drawing are very separate processes for me.
Alison Bechdel

I don't know, maybe it's because I was raised Catholic. Confession has always held a great appeal for me.
Alison Bechdel

I get a lot of mail from men who really identify with Stuart, you know, Sparrow's boyfriend. I love that. Even though I used to say I wanted men to read the strip even though there weren't any men in it, so they'd be forced to identify with the women.
Alison Bechdel

I hope that I can get people to read it without having to change it. Especially now that the strip has more different kinds of characters. It's really not all lesbians any more.
Alison Bechdel

I just have this sort of entrepreneurial spirit and I work really hard at promoting myself.
Alison Bechdel


I just met someone who read Gone With the Wind 62 times for exactly that same reason. She couldn't bear that it wasn't real. She wanted to live in it.
Alison Bechdel

I love Jules Feiffer. I didn't discover him until I was a little older.
Alison Bechdel

I never really read superhero stuff as a kid.
Alison Bechdel

I probably read Harriet the Spy about 70,000 times.
Alison Bechdel

I started to get bored with that stuff about only drawing men and I've taken it out of the slideshow.
Alison Bechdel

I'm pretty illiterate when it comes to comics history.
Alison Bechdel

It's a hard thing to age a character because you can't really suddenly give someone gray hair.
Alison Bechdel

It's definitely part of it, that the men were having fun and doing the interesting things but also, I don't know, I'm just thinking more about gender and how maybe in some way I am more of a boy than a girl.
Alison Bechdel

Mostly it was Mad magazine. And I did read a lot of - I had a subscription when I was little, but I also had access to some old collections, the little paperbacks of the really good stuff.
Alison Bechdel

My mother is, my father certainly was. They were kind of the local intelligentsia in the town where I grew up.
Alison Bechdel