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
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.
I was portraying the family through my eyes. Everything that's happened in the strip has happened to me.
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.
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.
We are, in the comics, the last frontier of good, wholesome family humor and entertainment.
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.
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.
A hug is like a boomerang - you get it back right away.
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.
We have five children whom I love dearly and have exploited mercilessly for my cartoons.
Jesus must have had a sense of humor. I like to think of Him as a guy who got people to listen to Him by leaving them laughing and chuckling with one another.
Many of the network television shows have done takeoffs on 'Family Circus,' including 'David Letterman,' 'Friends,' 'Roseanne,' and others, and, in my estimation the use of them is a compliment to the popularity of the feature, which just by mentioning it's name sets up the image of a warm, loving family-type feature.
I never studied art, but taught myself to draw by imitating the New Yorker cartoonists of that day, instead of doing my homework.
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.
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.
They invented hugs to let people know you love them without saying anything.
I did cartoons for four high school publications and then and there decided I wanted to spend my life at the drawing board.
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.
Laughter was a part of the church services I attended as a child.
I think it's a novelty for cartoon characters to cross over into another strip or panel occasionally.
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.
I don't just try to be funny.
In Roslyn, Pennsylvania, we started our real-life family circus. They provided the inspiration for my cartoons. I provided the perspiration.
Yesterday's the past, tomorrow's the future, but today is a gift. That's why it's called the present.
