Alison Bechdel famous quotes

The secret subversive goal of my work is to show that women, not just lesbians, are regular human beings.
-- Alison Bechdel

#Goal #Secret #Shows

I suppose that a lifetime spent hiding one's erotic truth could have a cumulative renunciatory effect. Sexual shame is in itself a kind of death.
-- Alison Bechdel

#Kind #Shame #Lifetime

In a narcissistic cathexis, you invest more energy into your ideas about another person than in the actual, objective, external person. So the man who falls in love with beauty is quite different from the man who loves a girl and feels she is beautiful and can see what is beautiful about her.
-- Alison Bechdel

#Beautiful #Girl #Falling In Love

If it weren't for the unconventionality of my desires, my mind might never have been forced to reckon with my body.
-- Alison Bechdel

#Mind #Desire #Body

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

#Grief #Sea #Design

Although I am good at enumerating my father’s flaws, it’s hard for me to sustain much anger at him. I expect this is partly because he’s dead, and partly because the bar is lower for fathers than it is for mothers.
-- Alison Bechdel

#Mother #Father #Bars

You can't live and write at the same time.
-- Alison Bechdel

#Writing

It's imprecise and insufficient, defining the homosexual as a person whose gender expression is at odds with his or her sex.
-- Alison Bechdel

#Sex #Odds #Expression

I’m glad mainstream culture is starting to catch up to where lesbian-feminism was 30 years ago.
-- Alison Bechdel

#Years #Feminism #Culture

And partly, the worst thing you could do in my family was need something from someone. So physical strength represented an avenue of self-sufficiency to me.
-- Alison Bechdel

#Self #Needs #My Family

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

#Trying #Comic #Wells

I grew to resent the way my father treated his furniture like children, and his children like furniture.
-- Alison Bechdel

#Children #Father #Way

I'll watch a movie only if it meets the following criteria: 1. It has to have at least two women in it. 2. Who talk to each other. 3. About something besides a man.
-- Alison Bechdel

#Movie #Men #Two

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

#Character #Hair #Giving

It's our very capacity for self-consciousness that makes us self-destructive!
-- Alison Bechdel

#Self #Consciousness #Capacity

It was not a triumphal return. Home, as I had known it, was gone.
-- Alison Bechdel

#Life Changing #Home #Gone

My father once nearly came to blows with a female dinner guest about whether a particular patch of embroidery was fuchsia or magenta. But the infinite gradations of color in a fine sunset - from salmon to canary to midnight blue - left him wordless.
-- Alison Bechdel

#Father #Sunset #Blow

I still found literary criticism to be a suspect activity
-- Alison Bechdel

#Criticism #Found #Stills

It was a vicious cycle, though. The more gratification we found in our own geniuses, the more isolated we grew.
-- Alison Bechdel

#Genius #Grew #Vicious

At first I was glad for the help. My freshmen English class, "Mythology and Archetypal Experience," confounded me. I didn't understand why we couldn't just read books without forcing contorted interpretations on then
-- Alison Bechdel

#Book #Class #Firsts

What would happen if we spoke the truth?
-- Alison Bechdel

#Spokes

She has given me a way out.
-- Alison Bechdel

#Way #Given

If there was ever a bigger pansy than my father, it was Marcel Proust.
-- Alison Bechdel

#Father #Proust #Bigger

Grief takes many forms, including the absence of grief
-- Alison Bechdel

#Grief #Absence #Form

I'd been upstaged, demoted from protagonist in my own drama to comic relief in my parents' tragedy
-- Alison Bechdel

#Drama #Parent #Tragedy

I started to get bored with that stuff about only drawing men and I've taken it out of the slideshow.
-- Alison Bechdel

#Taken #Men #Drawing

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.
-- Alison Bechdel

#Mad #Magazines #Littles

Nancy Drew was always changing her outfits. I despised girls' clothing, I couldn't wait to get home from school and get out of it. The last thing I wanted to read was minute descriptions of Nancy's frocks.
-- Alison Bechdel

#Girl #Home #School

Partly I resented being perceived as weak because I was a girl.
-- Alison Bechdel

#Girl #Weak

Sometimes I wish the writing and drawing were more integrated.
-- Alison Bechdel

#Writing #Drawing #Wish

When I was growing up in the 1960s, there was starting to be more books geared towards young adults.
-- Alison Bechdel

#Growing Up #Book #Adults

Yeah, I read Judy Blume. My mother didn't like that, but I read it anyhow.
-- Alison Bechdel

#Mother #Yeah

People really want to think that these things really happened. I don't know why that is important, but I know that when I finish reading a novel or something, I want to know how much of that really happened to this author.
-- Alison Bechdel

#Book #Reading #Thinking

I probably read Harriet the Spy about 70,000 times.
-- Alison Bechdel

#Spy

I never really read superhero stuff as a kid.
-- Alison Bechdel

#Kids #Superhero #Stuff

But I read comic books. I read things like Richie Rich and Little Lulu.
-- Alison Bechdel

#Book #Littles #Rich

The satiric ethos of Mad was a much bigger childhood influence.
-- Alison Bechdel

#Ethos #Mad #Childhood

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.
-- Alison Bechdel

#Creativity #Wish #Looks

Even drawing gray hair at all is difficult to render in black and white.
-- Alison Bechdel

#Black And White #Drawing #Hair

I'm pretty illiterate when it comes to comics history.
-- Alison Bechdel

#Beauty #Illiterate

I don't know, maybe it's because I was raised Catholic. Confession has always held a great appeal for me.
-- Alison Bechdel

#Catholic #Confession #Appeals

For some reason writing and drawing are very separate processes for me.
-- Alison Bechdel

#Writing #Drawing #Reason

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

#Spirit #Entrepreneurial #Entrepreneurial Spirit

I love Jules Feiffer. I didn't discover him until I was a little older.
-- Alison Bechdel

#Littles

I just met someone who read Gone With the Wind 62 times for exactly that same reason. She couldn't bear that it wasn't real. She wanted to live in it.
-- Alison Bechdel

#Real #Wind #Bears

Autobiographical comics, I love them. I love them.
-- Alison Bechdel

Watching everyone root through their psyche, it just delights me. Especially R. Crumb's stuff.
-- Alison Bechdel

#Roots #Delight #Stuff