GARRY TRUDEAU

As far as I'm concerned, there is no subject that's off the table.

Any time you bring sexuality into the comics pages, you have to brace for pushback.

Life is like a movie-since there aren't any commercial breaks, you have to get up and go to the bathroom in the middle of it.

Becoming the new feminine ideal requires just the right combination of insecurity, exercise, bulimia and surgery.

When you're young, with less on the line, it's easier to be audacious, to experiment. So I introduced the concerns of my generation - politics, sex, drugs, rock-and-roll, etc. - to the comics page, which for many years caused a rolling furor.

When you're young, you don't feel iconoclastic - you're just kind of doing what seems natural, what moves you.

In Palm Springs, they think homelessness is caused by bad divorce lawyers.

I try to take people one at a time, with all the contradictions and compromises that most of us live with.

Comic-strip artists generally have very modest ambitions. Day to day, we labor to fit together all these little moving parts - a character or two, a few lines of dialogue, framing, pacing, payoff - but we certainly don't think of them adding up over time to some larger portrait of our times.

I've been getting pulled from newspapers for my entire career.

In any event, it's not exactly a secret to regular readers what my views on the war are.

Because I was a diminutive, arty kid, I felt like a misfit in high school - but who doesn't?

That's what fiction writers do: create characters and do terrible things to them for the entertainment of others. If they feel guilty enough, they write happy endings.

I don't want to sound disingenuous here - controversy is obviously good for business, especially if your business is satire. And it does amplify the discussion - in my view, a good thing.

In their heyday, comics were a dominant force in popular culture, but that's over.

Lives have been altered in fundamental ways, and later, after they acquire a more complete understanding of what goals are actually attainable, many are left facing a lot of pain and frustration. And yet, there's no culture of complaint.

I'm a pointillist, just working my tiny little piece of the canvas. I'm not so good at perspective.

There is nothing worse than annotated humour.

Having stretched the boundaries some, I'm perfectly content now to work within them. 'Doonesbury' doesn't need to become 'South Park.' You won't ever see any singing turds.

I just happen to have one of those skill sets that allows me to work in my underwear.

I can only try to keep the characters interesting; it's up to the readers to decide whether they're still relevant.

Satire is a form of social control, it's what you do. It's not personal. It's a job.

I found that not having a public profile was not hurting the work, and it freed me up to be the satirist I wanted to be.

There's always been some concern that adult subject matter should be quarantined from a page that attracts children. Unlike late at night, when 'South Park' and 'Colbert' are on, impressionable minds are wide awake when the newspaper arrives.

The strips about the military do seem to provoke moving and thoughtful responses. It's nice when the strip resonates, but more importantly, I need to know when I'm getting something wrong. The last thing I want to do is contribute to the suffering that wounded warriors already endure.