Literary Birthday – 5 July – Bill Watterson

Happy Birthday, Bill Watterson, born 5 July 1958.

Five Bill Watterson Quotes

1. You can lead people to truth, but you can’t make them understand it.
2. I just tried to write honestly, and I tried to make this little world fun to look at, so people would take the time to read it. That was the full extent of my concern. You mix a bunch of ingredients, and once in a great while, chemistry happens. I can’t explain why the strip caught on the way it did, and I don’t think I could ever duplicate it. A lot of things have to go right all at once.
3. Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive.
4. We’re not really taught how to recreate constructively. We need to do more than find diversions; we need to restore and expand ourselves. Our idea of relaxing is all too often to plop down in front of the television set and let its pandering idiocy liquefy our brains. Shutting off the thought process is not rejuvenating; the mind is like a car battery— it recharges by running.
5. I hope some historian will confirm that I was the first cartoonist to use the word ‘booger’ in a newspaper comic strip.

The Top 10 Calvin and Hobbes Quotes

1. Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.
2. Verbing weirds language.
3. We don’t devote enough scientific research to finding a cure for jerks.
4. I liked things better when I didn’t understand them.
5. It’s not denial. I’m just selective about the reality I accept.
6. People think it must be fun to be a super genius, but they don’t realise how hard it is to put up with all the idiots in the world.
7. Reality continues to ruin my life.
8. Dad, how do soldiers killing each other solve the world’s problems?
9. If people sat outside and looked at the stars each night, I’ll bet they’d live a lot differently.
10. God put me on earth to accomplish certain things. Right now, I’m so far behind, I’ll never die.

Bill Watterson is an American artist and the author of the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes.

by Amanda Patterson

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