Like everybody else, I've got dark and light, trying to hold onto the civilized part and use it successfully. I'm sure that includes competition, but not in a way that I can recognize. Most of the games I like have more to do with the process of the game or the aesthetics. Racing's really about the aesthetics for me, not particularly the idea of coming in first - though I certainly appreciate a champion, and I like watching people do something really well.

Anything really well-made has the effect of making you want to do what you do-better. Abrams has always made very beautiful books. It's exciting to see this same excellence applied to the presentation of comics. Abrams ComicArts shows comics are stepping out of vaudeville and into Carnegie Hall-but the Marx Brothers will always be welcome!

If you're not running through chaos together with kids, you're not really playing together.

I love racers from that early vintage antique era of the 1950s. There's just something about them. It's the last romantic epoch of car-making. They were not efficient, necessarily. They were put together with intuition and enthusiasm, not with a formula. That's as technical as I'll get.

Remember then that there is only one important time, and that time is now. The most important one is always the one you are with. And the most important thing is to do good for the one who is standing at your side. This is why we are here.

The strength of a story is the truth you find in it.

I'm always conscious of the fact that a book starts, basically, with a kid in a lap, and a parent reading to them. If I'm not at least understanding that the parent's got to be there, and the kid's got to be there, together, then I don't feel like I'm doing my job. I hope that the language or the dialogue or the way characters interact entertains parents - when I'm playing with my own kids, I'm entertaining myself too, as well as them.