You had to grow up sometime. The fellows who grew early, they were in jeopardy. They became the cops and the crooks, and the crooks became the gangsters. The crooks became the Al Capones.

The artist is the lowest form of life on the rung of the ladder. The publishers are usually businessmen who deal with businessmen. They deal with promotional people. They deal with financial people. They deal with accountants. They deal with people who work on higher levels. They deal with tax people, but have absolutely no interest in artists, in individual artists, especially very young artists.

I feel like an independent man, and I am. This is the kind of feeling I always wanted. You can rarely get that... Well, I could rarely get that in the early part of my life.

I'm a guy who had to perform some way. I had to perform in some way. If not as an actor, I'd perform as an artist. It would have been something that would be outstanding in its own way.

An artist has to be humble, an editor must be officious, and a publisher must be somewhere out in the galaxy enjoying godhood. It was a caste system, pure and simple. And it was accepted that way. Nobody thought of contracts, nobody thought of insisting on better deals.

I've done my job extremely well. My only beef is that a lot of people have put their fingers in whatever I've done and tried to screw it up, and I've always resented that.

When Superman came out it galvanized the entire industry. It's just part of the American scene.