We are all continually embarking on first drafts, in every aspect of our lives.

I'm well beyond dyslexic: I have no sense of direction; I never know where I am.

My success was the shock of recognition, probably, rather than the quality of the work. I mean, the quality may have been fine, but there's a lot of fine work out there. It was the fact that I was doing something that at that time, nobody else was doing, except for say, Mort Saul out in San Francisco on The Hungry Eye, and "Second City" was emerging out in Chicago. Nothing in print. It was basically happening in cabaret and nothing in fiction. And certainly nothing in New York in cartoons.

I was doing cartoons and mocking white liberals, mocking the attitude of government who said to go slow, while intending to do absolutely nothing for black people, then called Negroes. And I had a lot of fun and I expressed a lot of anger. That was a thing that was important to know at that time. As I was emerging into more and more into politics that I was angry.

You know with Obama being elected, we had a wonderful opportunity. I hope it's not blown, and we have forms of government that don't seem to be up to the level of the leaders who are around who will want to move this country in a proper direction. Where that goes and how that goes, I mean, we seem determined to not move ahead, to stay in the same place. And there are a lot of nuts out there as well.

The city keeps reinventing itself. And each generation thinks, as they enter it, that they've missed the best of it, and then they become the authors of the next "best." And so it goes on and on and on. And New York keeps redefining itself and reinventing itself, and then you look at it and it's pretty much the way it was back in the 1920's., or in the 1930's. Something stylistically different in some ways, but it's still got the same vitality.

I grew up to have my father's looks, my father's speech patterns, my father's posture, my father's opinions, and my mother's contempt for my father.