Quotes from Alison Bechdel

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

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

Basically, my work is play. It never actually feels that way - I'm always aiming to attain that state. But I get to do for a living what I did as a child for fun, and that's pretty cool.

Writing this book feels like a completely different activity from writing my comic strip because it's about real life. I feel like I'm using a part of my brain that's been dormant until now.

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.

Well, I'm always working on my comic strip and trying to, you know, keep cranking that out.

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.

She has given me a way out.

When I grew up, I studied karate for years. I got pretty strong, but eventually I had to acknowledge that I really didn't like fighting at all, so I quit.

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.

Was Daedalus really stricken with grief when Icarus fell into the sea? Or just disappointed by the design failure

The web is my unconscious but it's also a wish -- a fantasy of what my own creativity might look like if I weren't constantly impeding its flow.