I open journal, I look at the picture and I remember where I was. And I remember the time of day, the temperature of the air, what music was playing, or who was talking to me, or who was looking over my shoulder and what conversations we had and the smells of the earth and the time of year it was. It's all there for me in a way that we don't get looking at a snapshot. Most of us look back at a snapshot from ten years ago and say, where was that? We don't even remember where we were.

Teenagers are always sneaking around in drawers where they shouldn't go and reading things they shouldn't be reading. And that's an attempt to try, I think, to penetrate, that's how I found out as a teenager what was going on, was by sneaking into drawers and reading letters that I had no business reading.

I think all kids feel that their lives are tough, and that they've, been given an unfair shake for one reason or another. So I think there's a lot of kids who relate to my story. They also relate to the fact that I got out of it. And I tell them that my refuge from all that was books - the library was my safe place. And the art room was my safe place because there I knew what I was doing.

Humanization and coming to understand somebody as a human being is about as good a kind of forgiveness as you can get, I think.

By the time that book So You Want to Be President? came along, we had already had enough presidents that had shown us that presidents are human beings. So I felt I was contributing to the common knowledge there, but not revealing anything really new - sort of supporting what everybody already was suspicious of.

I don't know if I ever would have developed into a good actor, but that got completely scotched when I lost my vocal cord at 14 in the operation. But writing always - writing plays, writing, writing, writing, that was what I wanted to do.

The whole basis of working in black and white and grays became the basis of my understanding of color, because it's all about tone, it's all about light and dark. If you don't get that, then your color work is going to be a mess. So that's the beginning of the toolkit: drawing and black and white media.