I started sharpening pencils at the census and how that was a difficult time in my life because my marriage was ending and I had quit cartooning and I didn't know what to do with myself.

Any working cartoonist will tell you this, anybody who's working in a creative field: at some point, it's a job. You have deadlines. I think, for over a year, I refused to make them for publications, because I only wanted to make them when I wanted to make them. But at some point, I was like, "This is crazy, you have an opportunity to be a professional cartoonist.

I've never been good at self-promotion. And my URL is really obscure. And for years and years, there was nothing about me on my website.

I don't want to be one of these people who's like, "Man, I don't know where my ideas come from and I don't know why this works."

The way you make money is to do something you don't like to do. And that's how you know you're a virtuous person.

Obviously, I never had to sketch anything out. To me, that was the appeal of working with clip art, working digitally. You make it and it's done.

The things I'm grateful for are: I had the one thing that I feel really lucky about, which is that I made something, I made art, that truly - in a weird way - truly comforted me and comforted a lot of people. And I'm really grateful that I got to have that experience.