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.

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.

Leslie Stein's comics give readers privileged access to a complete and wholly original world of gently skewed wonders.

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.

I don't believe in art like I used to. I believe in something beyond it, something that contains art and everything else. But I just don't quite have the nerve to chuck drawing and painting. Part of it is that I enjoy it too much, and part is that I don't have the courage to renounce the world. I don't want to move out of this nice neighborhood so that I can live in a shed and devote myself to meditating and touching something I can't feel. I'm addicted to the fun of playing in the world.

People aren't interested in seeing themselves as they really are.

A tree is an incomprehensibl e mystery.