Mostly it was Mad magazine. And I did read a lot of - I had a subscription when I was little, but I also had access to some old collections, the little paperbacks of the really good stuff.

If there was ever a bigger pansy than my father, it was Marcel Proust.

I still found literary criticism to be a suspect activity

Even drawing gray hair at all is difficult to render in black and white.

The web is my unconscious but it's also a wish -- a fantasy of what my own creativity might look like if I weren't constantly impeding its flow.

It was a vicious cycle, though. The more gratification we found in our own geniuses, the more isolated we grew.

Although I am good at enumerating my father’s flaws, it’s hard for me to sustain much anger at him. I expect this is partly because he’s dead, and partly because the bar is lower for fathers than it is for mothers.