I remember as a kid being scared of the things that go bump in the night, but I was way more scared of adults.

A sibling is a friend for life, but they are a friend for life that you are forced to have. And like anything that you are forced to do, occasionally people will drive you crazy.

I built a leprechaun trap that was made to look like a tiny hotel. There was a ramp where the leprechaun could walk into the hotel, see a Lego pot of gold on the other side, try to reach it, fall through a trap door, go through a tube, wind up in a biscuit tin, and be trapped. My mom, encouraging my madness, told me that the leprechaun might escape and that I needed a shot glass of whiskey down there to keep him occupied while he was in there.

My goal with Gravity Falls is to make people as paranoid and insane as I was as a child, and I'm delighted to see it's working!

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with UFOs in particular, and the paranormal. I grew up in the '90s, which is when The X-Files was at its zenith.

I absolutely love television. What's so great about TV is that I can tell 20 stories in a year. If I was working at a feature studio, I'd tell 1% of someone else's story, over the course of four years.

I've always loved The Simpsons, just because it was really, really funny. As a kid, you love the characters. You know that the dad is dumb and frustrated, and you know that the boy is smarter than everyone else around him and is constantly getting into mischief.