No matter what I accomplish, it doesn't seem like much compared to surviving Auschwitz.

I know this is insane, but i somehow wish i had been in auschwitz with my parents so i could really know what they lived through! I guess it's some kind of guilt about having had an easier life than they did.

One way of understanding a graphic novel is that it's an ambitious comic and one way or another my comics have had ambitions. I have no problem with escapism. When I get my depressions all I want to do is escape reality.

On September 11 one of the messages on our answering machine was from The New Yorker saying get down here right away for a special issue we'll be doing. That seemed so irrelevant to me, considering the cataclysm. I went to my studio for a while and I was processing the news. Because when we were in the thick of it, it just felt like Mars Attacks!, Is Paris Burning?, and I had no perspective. For a while, I thought I should go down and look for bodies. At the same time, since The New Yorker was looking for images, I thought, "Well, I'm more trained to look for images than for bodies."

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.

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

I always have been and will remain someone who loves real, 3D, substantial books. And I don't believe that it's a wistful, nostalgic interest like vinyl collectors. It's not the same thing.