One of the things I would like to do is make up stories that I would have enjoyed when I was a kid. So, if I'm thinking about an audience, it's usually a younger version of myself.

A lot of people believe that if everybody just did what they were told - obeyed - everything would be fine. But that's not what life is all about. That's not real. It's never going to happen.

Sometimes people get mad at The Simpsons' subversive story telling, but there's another message in there, which is a celebration of making wild, funny stories.

I also found child's play - stuff that was not considered serious, but goofy - was the stuff I liked to do, so I still do it as an adult.

I want it to go on, but I want us to go out on top.

The writers led by Mike Scully are fantastic. And they're creating original stories that not only don't repeat what we've already done, they also don't repeat anything I've seen on television.

We've got a bunch of new writers now who tell me they grew up watching The Simpsons. It's bizarre, and they're writing some very funny stuff.

A lot of our writers, like Conan O'Brien, moved on to other things.

Since I was there in the very beginning, I know the history of the characters. So, I make comments about the tone and sometimes remind the writers that we've done that before.

I love the idea that we put in jokes the kids don't get. And that later, when they grow up and read a few books and go to college and watch the show again, they can get it on a completely different level.

Everybody doesn't have to get every joke. People really appreciate not being condescended to.

Eat my shorts!

Don't have a cow, man.

In 'Futurama,' the skin color is no longer yellow. They have actually evolved to cartoon skin tone. But they still have four fingers.

I think there is a certain charm to the hand drawn image that I like. My problem with CGI is that it's so rich in texture that my eyes actually get tired. Everything is in focus down to the littlest leaf.

I went to Bali, and I was in a small village, and somebody who was with me showed a woman a little figurine of Bart and asked: 'Do you know who this is?' And she said: 'Mickey Mouse.'

We've been running a little behind schedule. But only by about 15 years or so.

When The Simpsons came around, there really was nothing else like it on TV. It's hard to imagine, but when Fox first took the plunge with it, it was considered controversial to put animation on prime time.

Well, most grown-ups forget what it was like to be a kid. I vowed that I would never forget.

Most TV shows don't reward you for paying attention.

Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.

Because good writing in a TV cartoon is so rare, I think the animation on The Simpsons is often overlooked.

'The Simpsons' is an especially collaborative show.

You've got to embrace the future. You can whine about it, but you've got to embrace it.

The best stories in our culture have some sort of subversiveness - Mark Twain, 'Catcher in the Rye.' You provide kids with great stories and teach them how to use the tools to make their own.

'The Simpsons' is about alienation and the ambivalence of living with a family who you love but who drive you completely crazy.

Sometimes people try to read into my strip and find out what my state of mind is. And I can say if I'm in a good mood, generally the comic strip starts out in a good mood, but the punchline is very negative and sour.

The scary thing about the future... there will be tiny cameras everywhere, and they'll be flying around like mosquitoes and drones. That will be bad. Drones are scary. You can't reason with a drone.

My standard comment is, 'If you don't want your kids to be like Bart Simpson, don't act like Homer Simpson.'

Families are about love overcoming emotional torture.

I thought I was going to make crazy cartoons for the rest of my life. I didn't think I'd ever get paid for it, didn't think I drew well enough, but I knew it made me happy.

People go into cartooning because they're shy and they're angry. That's when you're sitting in the back of a classroom drawing the teacher.

Me fail english? Thats unpossible.

Love is a perky elf dancing a merry little jig and then suddenly he turns on you with a miniature machine gun.

Donuts. Is there anything they can't do?

Here's to alcohol: the cause of, and answer to, all of life's problems.

We have 'Doctor Who' references on 'Futurama,' but we have a lot of science fiction references that I don't get; but in the staff we have experts on 'Star Trek,' 'Star Wars,' 'Doctor Who' and 'Dungeons and Dragons.'

I basically drew my own family. My father's name is Homer. My mother's name is Margaret. I have a sister Lisa and another sister Maggie, so I drew all of them. I was going to name the main character Matt, but I didn't think it would go over well in a pitch meeting, so I changed the name to Bart.

The thing about a cartoon is, you can do whatever you want. The tightrope that we are walking on 'The Simpsons' and 'Futurama' is 'How do you continue to surprise the audience, but make them good surprises?' Not every surprise is good, but you want to continue jolting people.

There's always room out there for the hand-drawn image. I personally like the imperfection of hand drawing as opposed to the slick look of computer animation. But you can do good stuff either way. The Pixar movies are amazing in what they do, but there's plenty of independent animators who are doing really amazing things as well.

Living creatively is really important to maintain throughout your life. And living creatively doesn't mean only artistic creativity, although that's part of it. It means being yourself, not just complying with the wishes of other people.

On 'The Simpsons,' I will say that we definitely like to comment on what's going on in the world, and we try to be funny. If we can figure out a way of being funny about it, then we've gone part of the way of accomplishing our task.

I grew up completely overwhelmed by TV, and part of the reason why I have gone into television is as a way to justify to myself all those wasted hours of watching TV as a kid. I can now look back and say, 'Oh, that was research.'

'The Simpsons' from the very beginning was based on our memories of brash '60s sitcoms - you had a main title theme that was bombastic and grabbed your attention - and when you look at TV shows of the 1970s and '80s, things got very mild and toned down and... obsequious.

I may be biting off more than I can chew, but with 'The Simpsons' and with 'Futurama,' what I'm trying to do in the guise of light entertainment, if this is possible - is nudge people, jostle them a little, wake them up to some of the ways in which we're being manipulated and exploited.

I went through a phase where people would introduce me at parties as a cartoonist, and everybody felt sorry for me. 'Oh, Matt's a cartoonist.' Then people further feeling sorry for me would ask me to draw Garfield. Because I'm a cartoonist, draw Snoopy or Garfield or something.

Nihilism in American comedy came along way before 'The Simpsons.' There was a fairly nihilistic point of view to 'Saturday Night Live,' for instance, back in the beginning, and a lot of really dark comedy had a really anti-sentimental take on life.

With Charlie Brown, it was about loneliness and isolation. I always thought that the thing about Charlie Brown and those characters was the absence of the parents. Half the strip was about who wasn't there. The parents were never in the picture.

It's a funny show. The characters are surprisingly likable, given how ugly they are. We've got this huge cast of characters that we can move around. And over the last few seasons, we've explored some of the secondary characters' personal lives a bit more.

Our solution on 'The Simpsons' is to do jokes that people who have an education, or some frame of reference, can get. And for the ones who don't, it doesn't matter, because we have Homer banging his head and saying, 'D'oh!'