Top 250 Bill Watterson Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “If your knees aren’t green by the end of the day, you ought to seriously re-examine your life.”

— Bill Watterson

152. “Look! A trickle of water running through some dirt! I’d say our afternoon just got booked solid!”

— Bill Watterson

153. “You know, there are times when it’s a source of personal pride to not be human.”

— Bill Watterson

154. “What assurance do I have that your parenting isn’t screwing me up?”

— Bill Watterson

155. “Why waste time learning, when ignorance is instantaneous?”

— Bill Watterson

156. “They say the secret of success is being at the right place at the right time, but since you never know when the right time is going to be, I figure the trick is to find the right place and just hang around.”

— Bill Watterson

157. “Often it takes some calamity to make us live in the present. Then suddenly we wake up and see all the mistakes we have made.”

— Bill Watterson

158. “You are demoted from First Tiger to bulk rate.”

— Bill Watterson

159. “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.”

— Bill Watterson

160. “I keep forgetting that rules are only for little nice people.”

— Bill Watterson

161. “Well, remember what you said, because in a day or two, I’ll have a witty and blistering retort! You’ll be devastated THEN.”

— Bill Watterson

162. “Boy, there’s nothing worse than an inscrutable omen.”

— Bill Watterson

163. “But Calvin is no kind and loving god! He’s one of the old gods! He demands sacrifice!”

— Bill Watterson

164. “Happiness is being famous for your financial ability to indulge in every kind of excess.”

— Bill Watterson

165. “Leave it to a girl to take the fun out of sex discrimination.”

— Bill Watterson

166. “CALVIN: Our hero regains consciousness at the feet of a sarcastic alien.”

— Bill Watterson

167. “Nowadays, ads don’t just sell a product. They sell an attitude! Look at this one! Here’s a cool guy saying nobody tells him what to do. He does whatever he wants and he buys this product as a reflection of that independence. So basically, this maverick is urging everyone to express his individuality through conformity in brand-name selection?”

— Bill Watterson

168. “I’ve always been a huge fan of fantasy and adventure, putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, I’m sure that’s why I’m an actor. It’s why I played with action figures as a kid, that’s why I wrote and drew and read comics as a kid.”

— Bill Watterson

169. “My problem is that I don’t paint ambitiously. It’s all catch and release – just tiny fish that aren’t really worth the trouble to clean and cook.”

— Bill Watterson

170. “Surprise is the essence of humor, and nothing is more surprising than truth.”

— Bill Watterson

171. “I’ve never understood people who remember childhood as an idyllic time.”

— Bill Watterson

172. “I don’t think I’d have been in such a hurry to reach adulthood if I’d known the whole thing was going to be ad-libbed.”

— Bill Watterson

173. “Instead of asking what’s wrong with rampant consumerism, we ought to be asking, ‘What justifies it?’ Popular art does not have to pander to the lowest level of intelligence and taste.”

— Bill Watterson

174. “I’ll bet my autopsy reveals my mouth is too big.”

— Bill Watterson

175. “CALVIN: When I grow up I want to be an inventor. First I will invent a time machine. Then I’ll come back to yesterday and take myself to tomorrow and skip this dumb assignment.”

— Bill Watterson

176. “In the right hands, a comic strip attains a beauty and elegance that, really, I would put against any other art.”

— Bill Watterson

177. “Mom and dad say I should make my life an example of the principles I believe in. But every time I do, they tell me to stop it.”

— Bill Watterson

178. “Specifically, I’d like to debate whether cannibalism ought to be grounds for leniency in murders, since it’s less wasteful.”

— Bill Watterson

179. “I write separately from the inking up. I’m sure this varies from cartoonist to cartoonist; I find that the writing is the hard part and the drawing is the fun part.”

— Bill Watterson

180. “MOMMMM, I’m thirsty... What’s this, just water?”

— Bill Watterson

181. “I think most of us would be horrified to meet ourselves and discover what everyone else already knows about us.”

— Bill Watterson

182. “Verbing weirds language.”

— Bill Watterson

183. “That’s the whole problem with science. You’ve got a bunch of empiricists trying to describe things of unimaginable wonder.”

— Bill Watterson

184. “It’s gratifying to hear that from people who care about comic art. I never know what to make of it when someone writes to say, “Calvin and Hobbes is the best strip in the paper. I like it even more than Nancy.””

— Bill Watterson

185. “If I had rolled along with the strip’s popularity and repeated myself for another five, 10 or 20 years, the people now ‘grieving’ for ‘Calvin and Hobbes’ would be wishing me dead.”

— Bill Watterson

186. “It’s going to be a grim day when the world is run by a generation that doesn’t know anything but what it’s seen on TV.”

— Bill Watterson

187. “I think hiccup cures were really invented for the amusement of the patient’s friends.”

— Bill Watterson

188. “Oh lovely snowball, packed with care, smack a head that’s unaware! Then with freezing ice to spare, melt and soak through underwear! Fly straight and true, hit hard and square! This, oh snowball, is my prayer. I only throw consecrated snowballs.”

— Bill Watterson

189. “You never know when some crazed rodent with cold feet could be running loose in your pants.”

— Bill Watterson

190. “You can draw a penguin on a toilet reading The New York Times and it’s adorable, but try doing it with an adult male character, and it’s disgusting.”

— Bill Watterson

191. “I think of football as a sport the way ducks think of hunting as a sport.”

— Bill Watterson

192. “I think comics overall would be better. I think there’s a tremendous potential to be tapped.”

— Bill Watterson

193. “When birds burp, it must taste like bugs.”

— Bill Watterson

194. “Idiocy is the essence of the male mind.”

— Bill Watterson

195. “If you’ve ever compared a film to a novel it’s based on, you know the novel gets bludgeoned. It’s inevitable, because different media have different strengths and needs, and when you make a movie, the movie’s needs get served.”

— Bill Watterson

196. “Garry Trudeau is the only cartoonist with the clout to get his strip published large enough to accomodate extended dialogue. It’s ashame.”

— Bill Watterson

197. “For me, it’s been liberating to put myself in the mind of a fictitious six year-old each day, and rediscover my own curiosity. I’ve been amazed at how one idea leads to others if I allow my mind to play and wander.”

— Bill Watterson

198. “I won’t eat any cereal that doesn’t turn the milk purple.”

— Bill Watterson

199. “Virtual reality has nothing on Calvin.”

— Bill Watterson

200. “It’s surprising how hard we’ll work when the work is done just for ourselves.”

— Bill Watterson