There are many people who get beat up, who suffer, who are victimized, and then they sit down to write and they write crap. How many of these graphic novels over the years are from really talented people? Most of them actually, if you look at them, are self-pitying confessionals about "poor me".

Whatever New York loses, if you go to other cities around the world, or around the country, New York still has a kind of energy level you find nowhere else. Paris doesn't have it, London doesn't have it, San Francisco, a great city, doesn't have it.

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.

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

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'm not sure about that role any longer. The role used to be to mix things up and I think to a great extent it still is, but the quality of the work of the political cartoon has been succeeded by the wisecrack, the gag cartoon, so that the cartoonist becomes more of the equivalent of the Jay Leno monologues, or David Letterman monologues.

I've never met a cartoonist who isn't quirky or weird in some ways.