Garry Trudeau

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.

Well, it's a humor strip, so my first responsibility has always been to entertain the reader... But if, in addition, I can help move readers to thought and judgment about issues that concern me, so much the better.

Humor can inform and break down stigma, which is a huge issue in the military.

I'm still passionately interested in what my fellow humans are up to. For me, a day spent monitoring the passing parade is a day well-spent.

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

I think it's very dangerous for people who do anything that's public to venture on the Web and check out what people are saying about them. Yes, you're bound to find things that will delight you - but you also find things that will make you brood and feel bad about yourself. Why would you intentionally invite that into your life?

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.

Commencement speeches were invented largely in the belief that outgoing college students should never be released into the world until they have been properly sedated.

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

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.

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

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