I think as soon as I figured out - and this must have been incredibly young - that comic books were made by humans, rather than being natural phenomenon likes trees or rocks, I just wanted to be one of the people who did that. So I was copying all kinds of cartoons that I was reading, comic books, and eventually learned how to draw cartoon books step-by-step and just, I don't know, I'm not an especially quick learner, but I sure was a dedicated one.

Comics are a gateway drug to literacy.

Even on the iPad or the Kindle, when reading a book, you're rewarded for pressing a button - it's almost as if it were a Pavlovian thing. There's a little action that happens. And that there's always a little pump of adrenaline that happens. But that pump is different when you're lifting a page as if it was a curtain in a theater to show you another thing.

To die, it's easy. But you have to struggle for life.

Samuel Beckett once said, "Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness." ...On the other hand, he SAID it.

I became comfortable with what I knew would be the process of trying to pick up the pieces of brain that were in the rubble and tried to make some mosaic out of the pieces and that that would be the trajectory.

It's not an accident that, while bookstores are all in a tizzy, one of the more lively and alive sections is the so-called "graphic novel" section, because those are harder to replace.