"There are certain children who are told they are too sensitive, and there are certain adults who believe sensitivity is a problem that can be fixed in the way crooked teeth can be fixed and made straight. And when these two come together you get a fairy tale, a kind of story with hopelessness in it. I believe there is something in these old stories that does what singing does to words. They have transformational capabilities, in the way melody can transform mood. They can't transform your actual situation, but they can transform your experience of it. We don't create a fantasy world to escape reality, we create it to be able to stay."
*
"Playing and fun are not the same thing, though when we grow up we may forget that, and find ourselves mixing up playing with happiness. There can be a kind of amnesia about the seriousness of playing, especially when we played by ourselves, or looked like we were playing by ourselves. I believe a kid who is playing is not alone. There is something brought alive during play, and this something, when played with, seems to play back."
*
"If playing isn't happiness or fun, if it is something which may lead to those things or to something else entirely, not being able to play is misery. No one stopped me from playing when I was alone, but there were times when I wasn't able to, though I wanted to --- there were times when nothing played back. Writers call it 'writer's block.' For kids there are other names for that feeling, though kids don't usually know them."
*
"I knew who the best artist were in our class, who were the best writers. Out of 30 kids there were about ten that stood out and were good at something. The rest of us started wishing: I wish I could draw. I wish I could write. I wish I could dance. I wish I could sing. I wish I could act. I wish I could play music. I wish I could be funny. By 5th grade most of us already knew it was too late."
*
"In junior high I started drawing again one I found out I could copy other people's art and I was actually decent at it. And I'm thankful for this because I was by then completely unable to draw anything on my own that I could stand. I especially liked to copy comics."
*
"What happens when we write by hand? A body in motion is moved by... what? There is a state of mind which is not accessible by thinking. It seems to require a participation with someone. Something physical we move like a pen like a pencil. Something which is in motion. Ordinary motion like writing the alphabet."
*
"I can remember not being a teenager and then being one. Being catapulted into a new world contained by the old one, just by walking to school. Kids burn up in this atmosphere. Friendships atomize. But the teen part is smeltering itself together all along, and soon you can think of yourself no other way. Something was gone, but didn't miss it. I didn't miss it at all."
*
"What was Marilyn (my art teacher) doing when she sat there looking at my empty pictures? I don't believe it was thinking. I believe it was closer to the staring game I played in the trailer when I was little, a state of mind I had forgotten about. A different kind of looking. An ability to wait."
*
"When I was little, I noticed that making lines on paper gave me a certain floating felling. It made me feel like I was both there and not there. The lines made a picture and the picture made a story. I wasn't the only kid it happened to. Every kid I knew could do it."
*
"Before the two questions (Is this good? Does this suck?), pictures and stories happened in a way that didn't involve much thinking. One line led to another until they somehow finished. I never felt like I was trying, and the drawing itself didn't matter too me much afterward."
*
"When we remember something, do we use our imagination? When we imagine something, do we use our memory?"
*
"Stuart Dybeck wrote a book called childhood and other neighborhoods and I think this begins to describe it, the idea of our childhood as a neighborhood with something like streets and houses, school yards, and cemeteries, short cuts and long ways. It's a good way to start, by thinking of childhood as a place rather than a time. A place that already exists like an un played-with playset, needing only one thing to set all things in motion."
*
"Sometimes in order to remember we have to completely forget. Sometimes in order to forget we have to completely remember."
*
"A sentence is like an address in that way. A spoken word of thought."
*
"Lynda Barry has worked as a painter, cartoonist, writer, illustrator, playwright, editor, commentator, and teacher, and found they are very much alike."
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