I very early caught on that the editor of Cincinnati Post had something specific in mind that he was looking for, and I tried to accommodate him in order to get published. I would turn out rough idea after rough idea, and he would veto eighty percent of them. I pretty much prostituted myself for six months but I couldn't please him, so he sent me packing.

If you don't get a goodnight kiss, you get Kafka dreams.

The syndicates take the strip and sell it to newspapers and split the income with the cartoonists. Syndicates are essentially agents. Now, can you imagine a novelist giving his literary agent the ownership of his characters and all reprint, television, and movie rights before the agent takes the manuscript to a publisher? Obviously, an author would have to be a raving lunatic to agree to such a deal, but virtually every cartoonist does exactly that when a syndicate demands ownership before agreeing to sell the strip to newspapers.

Verbing weirds language.

What fun is it being cool if you can't wear a sombrero?

If I had rolled along with the strip's popularity and repeated myself for another five, 10 or 20 years, the people now "grieving" for "Calvin and Hobbes" would be wishing me dead.

The writing doesn't distract me while I'm drawing and vice versa. I can devote my full attention to each.