The artwork had very little to do with the thought process, and the writing too, for that matter. What happens, happens, and it happens outside the brain.

I've had enormous luck and enormous pleasure in working in such forms as movies and plays that I loved when I was a kid and I just - because I could always write dialogue, because I always had a sense of how people spoke. And because I had a strong narrative sense; growing up and loving stories, loving novels, I just seem to know how to tell a story and I read a lot, I went to a lot of movies, I went to a lot of plays, and it rubbed off on me. And that's all. It just rubbed off on me.

I come out of a Cold War sensibility, a Cold War mentality, and during those Cold War years, I used to know, I thought, the answers to everything. And since the end of the Cold War, I'm just a dumb as everyone else.

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.

Artists can color the sky red because they know it's blue. Those of us who aren't artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we're stupid.

I didn't have a job. Employers were afraid of losing their reputations. I didn't have a reputation. I had zilch. So, I had the freedom, which unemployment gives you, and that was to behave as badly as I believed I should under the circumstances. And the circumstances were quite awful.

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.