I can definitely say that of all my friends who I consider to be really great cartoonists, we're all trying to aim at basically the same thing, which is an ever closer representation of what it feels like to be alive.

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.

Cartooning is an artistic commitment that requires the full attention and passion of the artist on every level; one should not get into it if one expects to do anything more than produce a book or a story that is exactly as one wants it to be.

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.

I can definitely say that of all my friends who I consider to be really great cartoonists, we're all trying to aim at basically the same thing, which is an ever closer representation of what it feels like to be alive.

I guess we all make choices as to how we want to live, right?

A book sometimes seems to impose a through-line to life that real life doesn't actually have.