Top 30 Stephan Pastis Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The phrase ‘I just turn on my monkey and it makes me feel good’ sounds very dirty, but I can’t explain why. It’s great to try to use expressions like that on the comics page. People want to complain but they can’t, because they can’t figure out quite what they should be complaining about.”

— Stephan Pastis

2. “In memory of the esteemed Frederick Crocus, who’s not dead yet, but will be one day.”

— Stephan Pastis

3. “When I say ‘friends,’ I use that term loosely, as I don’t actually have any.”

— Stephan Pastis

4. “It’s best to love your family as you would a Siberian tiger-from a distance, preferably separated by bars.”

— Stephan Pastis

5. “Sticking to my schedule, Ive gotten over seven months ahead, which allowed me to write a Pearls Before Swine movie script for the big screen.”

— Stephan Pastis

6. “Scott Adams: From him, I learned how to write a three-panel comic. Probably the best pure writer on the comics page.”

— Stephan Pastis

7. “When you can’t draw chameleons and you can’t draw blenders, it’s a bad idea to write strips where chameleons become blenders.”

— Stephan Pastis

8. “Having a syndicated comic strip is a great platform for ripping on expressions you hate.”

— Stephan Pastis

9. “Perhaps it is a secret yearning of all Hallmark employees to use the phrase ‘you big fat pain in the butt’ in an anniversary card.”

— Stephan Pastis

10. “Brits have a better sense of humor in most ways. It’s darker, more cutting.”

— Stephan Pastis

11. “The writing is done on the computer, and the drawing is done by hand. I write, write, write, then I hit the illustration.”

— Stephan Pastis

12. “Me no read. Look how smart me is.”

— Stephan Pastis

13. “If a restaurant offers crayons, I always take them and color throughout the meal. It beats talking to the people I came to dinner with.”

— Stephan Pastis

14. “If you put me in South Park, that audience is going to fall asleep in five minutes.”

— Stephan Pastis

15. “I don’t like drawing characters facing right. If I tried to do that at a book signing, I’d have to pencil it first.”

— Stephan Pastis

16. “When I was at the University of California at Berkeley, I went to some classes that must have had more than four hundred students in them. I almost always sat in the far back of the auditorium so I could read the newspaper. I remember that I stayed late one day to ask the professor a question, and when I got up to him, all I could think to myself was, ‘So this is what the professor looks like.”

— Stephan Pastis

17. “Whenever I see people with their collars up, I’m tempted to point it out to them like you would for someone who has a food stain on their shirt or food in their teeth, as if to say, ‘Your fashion sense is so offensive I’m assuming it’s some sort of accident you’ll want to fix.”

— Stephan Pastis

18. “When people bore me, I close my eyes and try to remember the order the Seven Dwarfs marched in. But it’s not always the dwarfs I think about. Sometimes aI try to list all of the Canadian provinces.”

— Stephan Pastis

19. “Repeats are the absolute soul-crushing killers of the comics page.”

— Stephan Pastis

20. “You can write a little and can draw a little, but there’s necessarily a limitation on both in a comic strip, since it appears in such a tiny space.”

— Stephan Pastis

21. “Stupid people and their stupid people ways!”

— Stephan Pastis

22. “I put Post-It notes everywhere to remind me of everything. I stick a ton of them on my computer monitor, telephone, and wallet. The problem now is that there are so many of them that my mind has blocked them all out. So I now need Post-It notes to remind me to look at my Post-It notes.”

— Stephan Pastis

23. “Man, I put myself in a lot of comic strips. Something’s wrong with my sense of self.”

— Stephan Pastis

24. “If you’re from a certain generation, you basically learn to read with ‘Peanuts.’ It’s sort of the template for the modern strip. Its influence ceased to be noticed because it’s in everything.”

— Stephan Pastis

25. “We need more cartoonists to truly retire when they retire, and not run repeats.”

— Stephan Pastis

26. “If somebody is not on the same page with me humor wise, I can’t give them that.”

— Stephan Pastis

27. “I’m very harsh on real estate agents. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because of how the call every small house ‘charming’ and every run-down house a ‘great fixer-upper’. Just once, I’d like them to show me a house and declare, ‘This one’s a piece of crap’.”

— Stephan Pastis

28. “I seem to be able to get away with pun strips if I add a panel at the end where I somehow indicate that I know it’s a bad pun.”

— Stephan Pastis

29. “One funny image can sometimes save an otherwise mediocre strip. At least that’s what I tell myself so I don’t feel quite as crappy when I’ve just wasted four hours drawing and coloring a Sunday strip.”

— Stephan Pastis

30. “I was a lawyer for 10 years, and when youre in law, things really have to get done, or somebody sues you. Its a great trick.”

— Stephan Pastis

31. “Basically, I learned to read by reading ‘Peanuts,’ just wanting to know what they were saying.”

— Stephan Pastis

32. “I recently forced myself to read a book on quantum physics, just to try and learn something new. I was confused by the middle of the first sentence and it all went downhill from there. The only thing I can remember learning is that a parallel universe can theoretically be contained on the head of a needle. I don’t really know what that means, but I am now more careful handling needles.”

— Stephan Pastis

33. “If I go to Stanfurd, I can get a good job and not have to sell oranges by the side of the highway.”

— Stephan Pastis

34. “Ohhhhkay... say again but slooooowly.”

— Stephan Pastis