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" I think of my drawing style like handwriting: it's a mix of whatever handwriting you're born with, plus bits and pieces you've pilfered from other people around you. "

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" One way of paying tribute to my parents was 'bearing witness' as the Quakers do - writing down everything that was happening instead of turning my back on it and pretending that it was all great. "

Roz Chast

Way

Down

Back

" My kids always joked that I spent more time cooking the birds' food than I have cooking for them. And it's probably true. "

" For me, drawing was an outlet. No one in school said, 'Oh, she can do sports,' or, 'She's pretty,' but I could draw. "

Roz Chast

Sports

Said

" I've done a lot of death cartoons - tombstones, Grim Reaper, illness, obituaries... I'm not great at analyzing things, but my guess is that maybe the only relief from the terror of being alive is jokes. "

" I don't like anything that looks gelatinous - really weirds me out. But when I was a kid, I used to get very, very upset if anything had a kind of chalky texture; like, certain kinds of cottage cheese I know have a weird chalkiness. "

Roz Chast

Upset

Weird

" I think, especially with my parents, I wanted to remember who they were. I wanted to remember all of it. I didn't want to purge myself of it. I wanted to remember it. "

" I have an African gray parrot; her name is Eli. We thought she was a boy. And a blue-streaked lory named Marco. He's 10. And a yellow and green parakeet, Petey. He's very cute, but he's getting old. "

" I think when your parents die, it is kind of like a moving sidewalk: you're not just on the sideline and watching them go by. You know, you're going to the same place they are. "

" You might have a worry that's so stupid it just peters out by itself, like a bad investment. "

" My life is so boring that your brains are going to melt and come out of your eyes. "

" My parents were very, very close; they pretty much grew up together. They were born in 1912. They were each other's only boyfriend and girlfriend. They were - to use a contemporary term I hate - co-dependent, and they had me very late. So they had their way of doing things, and they reinforced each other. "

Roz Chast

Parents

Together

" I always imagined my little cartoons on plates for some reason. "

" Childhood - that was not my favorite time in my life. "

" I've had people ask me if it would have been easier to take care of your parents if you had siblings, and I think it's 50/50. I know people who have siblings, and there is a lot of acrimony because somebody always feels that they are doing more than the other person. "

" I don't put myself through that nauseating experience of looking at someone's face while they go through your stuff. Ugh! It's just horrible! It gives me the cringes to even think about it. "

" I don't like cartoons that take place in Nowhereville. I like cartoons where I know where they're happening. "

" Sometimes, you know - I think, with a lot of things, at the time, everything is extremely upsetting, and then you look back on it, and it actually can be sort of funny. "

" Did you know that you can live on Ensure for a year? A person can live for a really long time just lying in bed and drinking Ensure - way longer than you think. "

" I think I have a habit of, in my head, taking notes on whatever, you know, whether they're verbal or pictorial or just making a note of things as they're happening. "

" Being female was just one more way I felt different and weird. I was also a young 'un, and also my cartoons were not like typical 'New Yorker' cartoons. "

Roz Chast

Way

Weird

" I love my parents. I did love them. It's complicated. "

" My works were not - and they still aren't - single panel gags with a punch line underneath them. I like a lot of those cartoons; I just don't draw them. "

" I don't like holidays. And I don't like crowds of people. I don't like noise. "

" I love detail, like drawing what's on top of someone's coffee table. Maybe there's a little bowl of butterscotch candies on it, next to the four TV remotes. "

" I don't think any of my kids' books talk down to kids. "

" My parents scrimped and saved all their lives, to the point where my mother used a disgusting old oven mitt that was stained and partly patched together with a skirt I made in seventh grade. "

" I sometimes suffer from insomnia. And when I can't fall asleep, I play what I call the alphabet game. "

" In Brooklyn, I don't feel that I'm holding up people with briefcases if I catch a stroller wheel in the sidewalk. "

Roz Chast

People

Wheel

" I think, with my cartoons, the parent-like figures are kind of my own archeypes of parents, and they're taken a little bit from my parents and other people's parents, and parents I have read about, and parents I dreamed about, and parents that I made up. "

" I like being able to go grocery shopping and not feel that I'm fighting a thousand people. "

Roz Chast

Feel

Fighting