Bil Keane Quotes

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Bil Keane

Profession : Cartoonist

Birth : October 5, 1922

Rather than pinpointing any particular part of the country as a place where the family lives, I would prefer to have readers think we live just down the street from their own home.

Bil Keane

Religion was a part of our home life when I was growing up. I attended Catholic school. It was a good education - for the spiritual end, as well as for its discipline.

Bil Keane

We are, in the comics, the last frontier of good, wholesome family humor and entertainment.

Bil Keane

A hug is like a boomerang - you get it back right away.

Bil Keane

They invented hugs to let people know you love them without saying anything.

Bil Keane

Even the strictest religious person from the strictest religious sect allows a little levity. Today, they congratulate you for carrying the Christian message into the comics.

Bil Keane

Laughter was a part of the church services I attended as a child.

Bil Keane

I never studied art, but taught myself to draw by imitating the New Yorker cartoonists of that day, instead of doing my homework.

Bil Keane

I don't just try to be funny.

Bil Keane

On radio and television, magazines and the movies, you can't tell what you're going to get. When you look at the comic page, you can usually depend on something acceptable by the entire family.

Bil Keane

I had this desk alongside the most beautiful Australian 18-year-old girl with long brown hair, and I got up enough nerve to ask her for a date.

Bil Keane

I don't have to come up with a ha-ha belly laugh every day, but drawings with warmth and love or ones that put a lump in the throat. That's more important to me than a laugh.

Bil Keane

Some may look on my work as being corny or old hat and wonder if my observations on the typical family are passe, what with the single-parent family and mixed family units.

Bil Keane

When I was in high school at Northeast Catholic in Philadelphia in the late '30s, I found that drawing caricatures of the teachers and satirizing the events in the school, then having them published in our school magazine, got me some notoriety.

Bil Keane

I didn't always spell my name Bil. My parents named me Bill, but when I started drawing cartoons on the wall, they knocked the 'L' out of me.

Bil Keane

I was portraying the family through my eyes. Everything that's happened in the strip has happened to me.

Bil Keane

In Roslyn, Pennsylvania, we started our real-life family circus. They provided the inspiration for my cartoons. I provided the perspiration.

Bil Keane

I like to feel that what I'm doing portrays this: a family where there is love between mother, father and the kids. It's a subject that is near and dear to me.

Bil Keane

Many of my cartoons are not a belly laugh. I go for nostalgia, the lump in the throat, the tear in the eye, the tug in the heart.

Bil Keane

I think it's a novelty for cartoon characters to cross over into another strip or panel occasionally.

Bil Keane