Robert Mankoff Thinking Quotations

I know everybody wants humor to be subversive and speak truth to power. I don't think power's been listening, incidentally.

I think what Jewish culture taught me and what the - and Jewish culture now is everyone's culture - is all these embarrassing things, all these guilt-filled things, all these anxiety filled things are material.

I'm really interested in the link between creativity and humor because humor is a type of creativity, and I do think that humorous people and humorous health helps creativity.

I'm making fun of myself and I think I'm making fun of all men in our desperate, desperate attempt to understand the people we're with and hopefully through humor have them understand us.

Primitive, naive drawing can also be good drawing but it's hard to pull off. I don't think most submitters realize that.

You do have to put in a lot time to get good at anything and than includes cartoons. So I think it's true of art and everything else.

Sometimes you're noodling around with a sketch and something incongruous in the drawing calls forth the caption and other times you think of a line and just have to find a place for it. A cartoon with a caption like "I don't want to live forever, but I sure as hell don't want to be dead forever either" sprang into my head and I just had to find the right venue for it which was an old couple talking to each other.

People think you get one idea for a cartoon every week, and that's not the way it works. You usually get 10 or 15, and you're - certainly when I was a cartoonist, before I was a cartoon editor, you're rushing to do what is called the batch. When I was doing that, I liked to have, in general, about 10 cartoons.

It's not the ink, it's the think.