In 1908, you could easily earn $20 to $200 as a cartoonist. What's amazing is that it's still true!

With any work worth its salt, you have to trust the author enough to take its measure. And if you apply too many preconceptions, you are not taking its measure.

I became a degenerate artist. My parents were shaped by their own experiences, and artists weren't so useful in the death camps.

Sometimes I'm drawing onto a computer directly, sometimes I'm drawing on paper , so I can't really talk about drafts. It's just like having soft clay until it hardens. At least as much of the problem has to do with the decisions of what to represent, how to represent that, and how to reduce it down. The words in the balloons aren't particularly poetic necessarily, but it has the same problem as poetry, which is that one has to do great reduction. And if I tried to draw everything, you'd just have a tangled mess of a picture. The stripping down takes much longer than building up.

What we're losing culturally the fastest, aside from natural resources and oil and the idea of democracy and social justice, is the ability to concentrate.

I would say that, in the future, the book will be reserved for things that function best as a book. So, if I need a textbook that's going to be out of date because of new technological inventions, you're better off having it where you can download the supplements or the update. If you're going to read a quick mystery novel to keep you amused while you're traveling, it's fine.

I think a lot of America turned to art and culture after Sept. 11. I know the sales of bibles went shooting up, but so did the sales of poetry. I think in a crisis one looks to one's culture, partially to give validation to why one would want that culture to survive.