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" Cartooning is for people who can't quite draw and can't quite write. You combine the two half-talents and come up with a career. "
Matt Groening
Career
Up
Write
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" The nice thing about 'Futurama' for me personally was that it was a way to honor some of the traditional ideas in literary science fiction, not so much movie or television science fiction - although we have that too, obviously. Our situation, a workplace comedy, led to all sorts of stuff. "
Matt Groening
Honor
Ideas
Me
" I'm a writer who just happens to draw. "
Matt Groening
Happens
Who
Just
" I want it to go on, but I want us to go out on top. "
Matt Groening
Top
Us
Want
" On 'The Simpsons,' I will say that we definitely like to comment on what's going on in the world, and we try to be funny. If we can figure out a way of being funny about it, then we've gone part of the way of accomplishing our task. "
Matt Groening
Try
Task
Say
" I basically drew my own family. My father's name is Homer. My mother's name is Margaret. I have a sister Lisa and another sister Maggie, so I drew all of them. I was going to name the main character Matt, but I didn't think it would go over well in a pitch meeting, so I changed the name to Bart. "
Matt Groening
Family
Think
Sister
" My standard comment is, 'If you don't want your kids to be like Bart Simpson, don't act like Homer Simpson.' "
Matt Groening
Act
Like
Want
" The thing that makes me happiest about Simpsons Illustrated are all the drawings that we get from readers. I wish we could print them all. They're really imaginative. They show a lot of hard work. "
Matt Groening
Me
Wish
Hard
" The thing about a cartoon is, you can do whatever you want. The tightrope that we are walking on 'The Simpsons' and 'Futurama' is 'How do you continue to surprise the audience, but make them good surprises?' Not every surprise is good, but you want to continue jolting people. "
Matt Groening
You
Walking
Surprise
" I love the idea that we put in jokes the kids don't get. And that later, when they grow up and read a few books and go to college and watch the show again, they can get it on a completely different level. "
Matt Groening
Grow
Go
Love
" Science fiction and comedy are generally a pretty bumpy mix. "
Matt Groening
Science
Comedy
Pretty
" Don't have a cow, man. "
Matt Groening
Man
Cow
" Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come. "
Matt Groening
Love Is
Love
Racing
" Well, most grown-ups forget what it was like to be a kid. I vowed that I would never forget. "
Matt Groening
Like
Never
Kid
" People go into cartooning because they're shy and they're angry. That's when you're sitting in the back of a classroom drawing the teacher. "
Matt Groening
Angry
People
Go
" One of the great things about the Internet is that you can read what everybody has to say about everything. It is fascinating to me, the critiques about humor by people who have no sense of humor. "
Matt Groening
Humor
Great
You
" Charles Schultz is a really interesting case. He wrote that comic strip and drew it himself from beginning to end, and it's a work of genius. It's very simply drawn, but it has some really deep emotions that you don't expect in a silly-looking comic strip. "
Matt Groening
End
Interesting
Work
" We've been running a little behind schedule. But only by about 15 years or so. "
Matt Groening
Only
Years
Behind
" Our solution on 'The Simpsons' is to do jokes that people who have an education, or some frame of reference, can get. And for the ones who don't, it doesn't matter, because we have Homer banging his head and saying, 'D'oh!' "
Matt Groening
Solution
People
Education
" The best stories in our culture have some sort of subversiveness - Mark Twain, 'Catcher in the Rye.' You provide kids with great stories and teach them how to use the tools to make their own. "
Matt Groening
Great
Culture
You
" One of the things I would like to do is make up stories that I would have enjoyed when I was a kid. So, if I'm thinking about an audience, it's usually a younger version of myself. "
Matt Groening
Thinking
Audience
Kid
" I draw a weekly comic strip called Life in Hell, which is syndicated in about 250 newspapers. That's what I did before The Simpsons, and what I plan to do for the rest of my life. "
Matt Groening
Hell
Rest
Plan
" I know for a fact, obviously, because my kids grew up watching the show, that there are some things they are introduced to from 'The Simpsons', and then later in life they see the thing we're parodying. My kids had not seen 'Casablanca,' and we'd done parodies of 'Casablanca.' "
Matt Groening
Life
Watching
Know
" When The Simpsons came around, there really was nothing else like it on TV. It's hard to imagine, but when Fox first took the plunge with it, it was considered controversial to put animation on prime time. "
Matt Groening
Animation
Hard
Fox
" I gave away 'Life in Hell' when it was a little 'zine, and sold it at record stores for $1, and I knew from the time that I first did it that I would continue to do it, because it was fun. "
Matt Groening
Away
First
Fun
" I had been drawing my weekly comic strip, 'Life in Hell,' for about five years when I got a call from Jim Brooks, who was developing 'The Tracey Ullman Show' for the brand-new Fox network. He wanted me to come in and pitch an idea for doing little cartoons on that show. "
Matt Groening
Hell
Me
Life
" You've got to embrace the future. You can whine about it, but you've got to embrace it. "
Matt Groening
About
Whine
Got
" We have 'Doctor Who' references on 'Futurama,' but we have a lot of science fiction references that I don't get; but in the staff we have experts on 'Star Trek,' 'Star Wars,' 'Doctor Who' and 'Dungeons and Dragons.' "
Matt Groening
Doctor
Science
Star
" With 'Futurama,' I was just worried that somebody would beat us to it; it seemed so obvious that there should be an animated science fiction show set in the future. And one of the reasons why it's not, I learned, is that it's really, really difficult. "
Matt Groening
Show
Why
Difficult
" Donuts. Is there anything they can't do? "
Matt Groening
Donuts
Anything
" With animation, because you can draw anything and do anything and have the characters do whatever you want, the tendency is to be very loose with the boundaries and the rules. "
Matt Groening
You
Animation
Boundaries