My highlights from the book:
1. You don’t work all of your life to do something so you don’t have to do it.
2. Beginning with the first strip published on October 2nd, 1950, until the last published on Sunday, February 13th, 2000, the day after his death, Schultz wrote, penciled, inked, and lettered by hand every single one of the daily and Sunday strips to leave his studio, 17,897 in all for an almost fifty-year run.
3. If there were one bit of advice I could give to a young person it would be to do at least one task well.
4. Don’t sell out to the baser elements of your profession. Do what you do on a high plain.
5. There are certain seasons in our lives that each of us can recall, and there are others that disappear from our memories, like the melting snow.
6. Most comic strip ideas come from sitting in a room alone and drawing seven days a week, as I’ve done for 40 years.
7. People come up to me and say: “Are you still drawing the strip?” I want to say to them, “Good grief—who else in the world do you think is drawing it?” I would never let anybody take over. And I have it in my contract that if I die, then my strip dies.
8. But as the year went by, I could almost say that drawing a comic strip for me became a lot like a religion. Because it helps me survive from day-to-day. I always have this to fall back upon. When everything seems hopeless I know I can come to the studio and think: Here’s where I’m at home. This is where I belong —in this room, drawing pictures.
9. I think it is important for adults to consider what they were doing and what their attitudes were when they were the age their own children are now. There is no other real way of understanding the problems of children.
10. To have staying power you must be willing to accommodate yourself to the task. I have never maintained that a comic strip is Great Art. It simply happens to be something I feel uniquely qualified to do.
7. People come up to me and say: “Are you still drawing the strip?” I want to say to them, “Good grief—who else in the world do you think is drawing it?” I would never let anybody take over. And I have it in my contract that if I die, then my strip dies.
8. But as the year went by, I could almost say that drawing a comic strip for me became a lot like a religion. Because it helps me survive from day-to-day. I always have this to fall back upon. When everything seems hopeless I know I can come to the studio and think: Here’s where I’m at home. This is where I belong —in this room, drawing pictures.
9. I think it is important for adults to consider what they were doing and what their attitudes were when they were the age their own children are now. There is no other real way of understanding the problems of children.
10. To have staying power you must be willing to accommodate yourself to the task. I have never maintained that a comic strip is Great Art. It simply happens to be something I feel uniquely qualified to do.
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