I don't think of myself as an illustrator. I think of myself as a cartoonist. I write the story with pictures - I don't illustrate the story with the pictures.

Storytelling is one of comics' esthetic hurdles at the moment, which was the novelist's problem 150 years ago: namely, to take comics from storytelling into that of "writing," the major distinction between the two to me being that the former gives one the facts, but the latter tries to recreate the sensation and complexities of life within the fluidity of consciousness and experience. As far as I'm concerned, that's really all I've been trying to do formally for the past decade or more with comics, and it's certainly time-consuming, since it has to be done with drawings, not words.

I think cartooning gets at, and re-creates on the page, some sixth sense ... in a way no other medium can.

The modern world seems to make fun of people in a lot of ways.

As I get older I find myself thinking about stories more and more before I work so that by the time I eventually sit down to write them, I know more or less how it's going to look, start or feel. Once I do actually set pencil to paper, though, everything changes and I end up erasing, redrawing and rewriting more than I keep. Once a picture is on the page I think of about ten things that never would have occurred to me otherwise. Then when I think of the strip at other odd times during the day, it's a completely different thing than it was before I started.

It's somehow more comforting to imagine that one's suffering is unique, and to measure against what one doesn't know, rather than against what one does.

I had a messy signature as a child, and my grandmother said this suggested I had no regard for other people. She was right.