When you do the kind of work I do, everything is challenging, but probably the most challenging thing is getting up in the morning and getting on with it because it's so easy to stay in bed and not get on with it.

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.

Maturity is only a short break in adolescence.

There's the excitement of adding color, which I didn't know anything about until 1997 or so, when I did my first picture book. So, the kid's book in particular have been exciting for me because it forced me to go back to the work I loved as a young boy reading Sunday's supplements and comics in the Sunday papers when I was six, seven, eight, nine. And number of which have been in wonderful collections, beautifully reproduced.

If you are not able to communicate successfully between yourself and yourself, how are you supposed to make it with the strangers outside?

I think we overrate experience and what we've been through in terms of our success at doing the work we do. There are many people who get beat up, who suffer, who are victimized, and then they sit down to write and they write crap.

I learned to distrust writers who talked about how they squeezed the blood onto the typewriter. They just don't want you to know how much fun they have - you'll resent it.