Matt Groening Quotes

My father leaving the family shaped who I was and how I looked at the world. By the same token, my father telling me fairy tales that he had made up shaped me profoundly, too.

What does it feel like to be a parent? What does it feel like to be a child? And that's what stories do. They bring you there. They offer a dramatic explanation, which is always different from an expository explanation.

I was a really big fan of cartoons growing up, and I loved to read too much into them most of the time.

When I was growing up, Dr. Seuss was really my favorite. There was something about the lyrical nature and the simplicity of his work that really hit me.

But when I was a little kid, I was always writing stories and illustrating little books that I would create.

My mother is a huge fan of my work. I told her about 'Coraline' long before the film was made, and she got the book and read it. She reminded me that when I was about five years old, I used to sit in the kitchen for hours and talk about my 'other' family in Africa, my other mother and father. I had totally forgotten that.

Growing up with three brothers and three sisters, I was the storyteller of the family... what my mother called 'The Liar.'

I do what I do because of Walt Disney. Goofy. Mickey Mouse. I never forgot how their films entertained me.

I was 8 years old when I went across the street from my house to a fair, and they always had a used book sale. For a quarter I bought a book called 'Come On Seabiscuit.' I loved that book. It stayed with me all those years.

For English assignments I was constantly coming up with these strange adventure stories... But I actually wanted to be an artist, or maybe work in the comic book industry.

My siblings were a bit younger than me, and I was always entertaining them and making up stories.

I believed in fictional characters as if they were a part of real life. Poetry was important, too. My parents had memorized poems from their days attending school in New York City and loved reciting them. We all enjoyed listening to these poems and to music as well.

I think by around the time I was about 8 or 9, the idea of filmmaking probably took hold. I made little Super 8 extravaganzas when I was a kid, the first being my own version of 'Romeo and Juliet,' and where I played all the parts except for Juliet.

I began writing fictional stories and little screenplays when I was in fifth grade.

I wanted to be a part of the Disney history.

I don't remember my father reading to me, but I remember him telling me bedtime stories. I got to pick what was in them, and then he'd make them up.

I've been writing since I was 7, but before that, I was orally making stories.

I have to say I regretted giving up animated movies.

I joke that I learned the essentials of storytelling from Hanna-Barbera, but I pretty much did. That kind of television is what enamored me as a kid, and that's what really got me hooked. You could say that's where it all began.

As a writer of fiction, I spend my days inventing real lives for make-believe people; what I create can only seem real.

I never grew up reading or fantasizing about fairy tales. I was always too busy, like, outside being a kid.

As a little girl living in the English countryside, I used to go running around in the forests, creating my own fairy tale.

I have on my bookshelf a book called 'Movie Monsters' by Alan Ormsby, a kids' book I got when I was in kindergarten. It started there.

I grew up reading 'The Jungle Books' and loving them.

I'm sick of 'Wild Things.'