Doing a story about my mundane, waking life, how much I don't like my job, or breaking up with someone, I don't think so. Those stories don't interest me that much as a general thing.

The fiction I tend to like is nothing like my own work. I like the kind of writing that shows me things I don't know about, and what I don't know about is the everyday, normal world.

People for whom art is religion can say, "What I love about art is that it points to a higher reality." Well, fine, but the time comes when the smart thing for such a person to do is to let go of the fun of the art and get into the hard work of attaining and understanding that higher reality, unmixed with worldly games.

I've often thought I would like to try to write a conventional novel, but I just don't know enough about the real world to write one.

When I started formulating the first Frank comic, I knew I wanted it to be something that was beyond time and specific place. I felt that having the characters speak would tie it to 20th-century America, because that would be the idiom of the language they would use, the language I use.

That Moorish architecture is all over the place, of course. It affects me everywhere I see it, as it does so many people. But Brand Library was a special place to me, and I know I've paid homage to it many times in my drawings.

Doing a story about my mundane, waking life, how much I don't like my job, or breaking up with someone, I don't think so. Those stories don't interest me that much as a general thing.