Al David Quotes

The way you make money is to do something you don't like to do. And that's how you know you're a virtuous person.

Everyone has pencils in their house, no matter how hip and contemporary they are.

It would be amazing to tell my grandchildren, like, 'Yeah, I was paid to sharpen 1,000 pencils.'

The type of pop culture that is honestly very moving and powerful to me is [when artists] do their homework. They make it real.

I'd always been really intimidated by prose writing.

I've been really surprised about a lot of the negative comments about artisanal pencil sharpening. Like, it really rubs some people the wrong way.

The time that I would spend revisiting my old Get Your War On strips is more profitably spent Googling myself and reading comments about how people hate my pencil-sharpening business.

I don't want to be one of these people who's like, "Man, I don't know where my ideas come from and I don't know why this works."

I feel like really thinking about art and really appreciating it and learning the language of it just makes you more of a connoisseur. I believe that.

I have a really analytical approach to art. And the whole idea that you can't analyze what makes a joke funny...I do not agree with that at all.

I don't think I would've ever dared dreaming of becoming a professional cartoonist. I wouldn't set myself up for that disappointment.

Nobody could be a professional cartoonist, because you have to do something you don't like to do in order to be a responsible adult and pay the rent.

I didn't dare to dream of making money. But now of course, I've made many thousands of dollars sharpening pencils.

I liked sharpening pencils and I was like, "Oh, I wonder if I could get paid to do it." And I figured it out and I did it.

I'm not a professional comedian. Nobody comes to my comedy shows. That's just a little hobby.

Talking about my personal life onstage, I've realized I'm not one of those comics who can do that. I can allude to it but I don't want to be a confessional performer.

I've always liked Richard Pryor. I've always responded to rhythmic profanity.

I've never been good at self-promotion. And my URL is really obscure. And for years and years, there was nothing about me on my website.

Obviously, I never had to sketch anything out. To me, that was the appeal of working with clip art, working digitally. You make it and it's done.

I like feeling like I'm discovering something new. That's really a special feeling and also, you don't have it that often. At least, I don't. Maybe I'm not creative enough.

I just wanted a really simple, dramatic way so that fans, people who were reading my comic, would be like, "This is something different." Just to flag it, almost.

I started sharpening pencils at the census and how that was a difficult time in my life because my marriage was ending and I had quit cartooning and I didn't know what to do with myself.

I hate self-publishing; it's a real drag and it takes up a lot of space.

I had good relationships with stores. And I was like, "All right, I'll self-publish it. But I'm only going to do 1,000."

I'm interested in the structure of art and how it works. And the content is also interesting, but I don't want to keep the same structure and just plug in new content every week.

I have very limited craftsmanship. And a lot of the stuff I make plays on that.

The only reason to be in business is to be great.

You are losing because blacks are getting their civil rights in the cities.

I don't know that Donald Trump is anything more to Putin than what Lenin called a poleznye durak, a useful idiot.

You are losing because of Jewish bankers.

The future is itself a story, and predictions are stories we tell to amaze ourselves, to give hope to the desperate, to jolt the complacent.

We have to do our jobs better, more tirelessly and stop whining about it.

I don't think there will be fascism in America, but we have to do everything we can to fight against it.

I am an adult; deliberately naïve, dewy-eyed optimism is not the proper posture for a responsible adult, is it?

A huge constituency, such as Hispanics, is not 100 percent Democratic.

I have to always remember, writing is really hard.

Everybody has a cartoon of themselves. Mine is: I write very fast, and I'm ruthlessly efficient with my time.

I'm not the slowest writer that you know.

The minority vote is growing, which is part of the alarm of so many Republicans and why Trump constantly whipped up their alarm with his racist statements.

The Democratic vote consists of minorities and educated whites.

Clearly independent journalists - domestic journalists - run a high risk if they dare to take on serious investigative work.

I actually have great hopes for the future.

I'm a journalist - I'm not Robert Caro. I have a day job, and a pretty consuming one - a joyfully consuming one.

Not all political prisoners are innocents.

Democratic institutions, even in the oldest operating democracy in the world, are anything but perfect.

Prediction is a low form of journalism.

Donald Trump seems to think it is within his rights to trample the First Amendment, to disdain the press, to punish protesters or flag-burners, to ban ethnic categories of immigrants, and so on.

Donald Trump appoints people of low quality, to say the least.

Donald Trump lies with astonishing frequency and in stunning volume.

There are inconsistencies in Donald Trump's ideology.