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.

It is easy to believe we are each waves and forget we are also the ocean.

I don't think I compete with myself by trying to make a better book. I don't know that that's possible. I mean, I've already done my best books, so I'd like to just make something I also like now.

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.

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

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!

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.