Jules Feiffer
Jules Feiffer
Jules Ralph Feiffer is an American syndicated cartoonist and author, who was considered the most widely read satirist in the country. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 as America's leading editorial cartoonist, and in 2004 he was inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame. He wrote the animated short, Munro, which won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1961. The Library of Congress has recognized his "remarkable legacy", from 1946 to the present, as a...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionCartoonist
Date of Birth26 January 1929
CityBronx, NY
CountryUnited States of America
If you are not able to communicate successfully between yourself and yourself, how are you supposed to make it with the strangers outside?
The artwork had very little to do with the thought process, and the writing too, for that matter. What happens, happens, and it happens outside the brain.
The weekly cartoons, as were my plays, came from a sense of criticism, criticism of the times, critical of the culture, of our manners and attitudes towards each other. The children's books come from the reverse. They're more supportive, since we're living in a time where we talk more about kids and do less, we talk about balancing the budget and we do it by cutting education.
We want playmates we can own.
I grew up to have my father's looks, my father's speech patterns, my father's posture, my father's opinions, and my mother's contempt for my father.
Over the years, I discovered over and over again that once you lose control, you have a chance of getting good at it. And once you're controlling the work, it's not going to be very good, or it won't be as good as it should be.
Writing, I explained, was mainly an attempt to out-argue one's past; to present events in such a light that battles lost in life were either won on paper or held to a draw.
I seemed to have instinctually a strong idea of how the strip had to be written from the beginning. That changed too, but it was more in the direction of where it was headed. I didn't have a clue as to the drawing style, because the drawing style that I was groomed on from the beginning was newspaper comic strips, which were much more conventional.
Imagination continually frustrates tradition; that is its function.
Eventually, if it's on your mind, you stumble on it. You need a certain amount of luck and persistence.
I used to think I was poor. Then they told me I was not poor, I was needy. They told me it was self-defeating to think of myself as needy, I was deprived. Then they told me underprivileged was overused. I was disadvantaged. I still do not have a dime but I have a great vocabulary.
We are all continually embarking on first drafts, in every aspect of our lives.
I was never interested in the two-party system per se. I was interested in how authority was abused by government, and how lies were told, and rewritten, to seem to be true. I came up out of a tradition of radical journalism.
Kids are in ongoing need of support, and they get various versions of it from grownups which aren't legitimate - a grownup's version of what we think you should have. We tell you what creativity is, and we even tell you what you're thinking.