My parents were born in 1912; they graduated from college into the Depression. They kept notebooks of every nickel they spent, and these habits of frugality from having grown up so poor never left them. – Roz Chast
I think I have a habit of, in my head, taking notes on whatever, you know, whether they’re verbal or pictorial or just making a note of things as they’re happening. – Roz Chast
It’s like a ‘chicken or the egg’ thing. We’re all part of the culture. We’re reflecting it; we’re changing it. So, yeah, I think culture is always changing. – Roz Chast
Did you know that you can live on Ensure for a year? A person can live for a really long time just lying in bed and drinking Ensure – way longer than you think. – Roz Chast
It cracks me up to see these ads for TV – for Depends or for glue for your dentures. The people in them look 55 with a hint of gray. Where are the people who are falling apart? We don’t see that. – Roz Chast
I cannot stand superheroes. I do not understand any of its appeal. It has just bored me to death since I was a little kid. – Roz Chast
For me, drawing was an outlet. No one in school said, ‘Oh, she can do sports,’ or, ‘She’s pretty,’ but I could draw. – Roz Chast
I’ve done a lot of death cartoons – tombstones, Grim Reaper, illness, obituaries… I’m not great at analyzing things, but my guess is that maybe the only relief from the terror of being alive is jokes. – Roz Chast
The wonderful thing about the cartoon form is it’s a combination of words and pictures. You don’t have to choose, and the contribution of the two often winds up being greater than the sum of its parts. – Roz Chast
I’m sure that my parents’ behavior has entered my work, I’m sorry to say. I don’t think you need to have a difficult childhood to be funny, but it helps. – Roz Chast
Being female was just one more way I felt different and weird. I was also a young ‘un, and also my cartoons were not like typical ‘New Yorker’ cartoons. – Roz Chast
My parents were very, very close; they pretty much grew up together. They were born in 1912. They were each other’s only boyfriend and girlfriend. They were – to use a contemporary term I hate – co-dependent, and they had me very late. So they had their way of doing things, and they reinforced each other. – Roz Chast
When my father died, my mother was still alive. And I think when your second parent dies, there is that shock: ‘Oh man, I’m an orphan.’ There’s also this relief: It’s done; it’s finished; it’s over. – Roz Chast
I used to think of the cartoons as a magazine within a magazine. First you go through and read all the cartoons, and then you go back and read the articles. – Roz Chast
There’s something about most phobias where there’s a tiny, tiny corner where you think this really actually could happen. – Roz Chast
I don’t like anything that looks gelatinous – really weirds me out. But when I was a kid, I used to get very, very upset if anything had a kind of chalky texture; like, certain kinds of cottage cheese I know have a weird chalkiness. – Roz Chast
I can’t even look at daily comic strips. And I hate sitcoms because they don’t seem like real people to me: they’re props that often say horrible things to each other, which I don’t find funny. I have to feel like they’re real people. – Roz Chast
I sometimes suffer from insomnia. And when I can’t fall asleep, I play what I call the alphabet game. – Roz Chast
My works were not – and they still aren’t – single panel gags with a punch line underneath them. I like a lot of those cartoons; I just don’t draw them. – Roz Chast
I had to get good grades and do well in school – my mother was an assistant principal and my father was a teacher – and they took this very seriously. – Roz Chast
I don’t like cartoons that take place in Nowhereville. I like cartoons where I know where they’re happening. – Roz Chast
It was deeply interesting to observe my mother closely and to draw her. During those last months, she wasn’t speaking much, if at all, and it was a way for me to be with her. It felt very natural. – Roz Chast
Grime is not like messiness or some fingerprints on a cabinet; it takes a long time to accumulate. – Roz Chast
I think that children’s books should be censored not for references to sex but for references to diseases. I mean, who didn’t think after reading ‘Madeline’ that they were going to get appendicitis? – Roz Chast
I don’t put myself through that nauseating experience of looking at someone’s face while they go through your stuff. Ugh! It’s just horrible! It gives me the cringes to even think about it. – Roz Chast
