I was never interested in the two-party system per se. I was interested in how authority was abused by government, and how lies were told, and rewritten, to seem to be true. I came up out of a tradition of radical journalism.

Over the years, I discovered over and over again that once you lose control, you have a chance of getting good at it. And once you're controlling the work, it's not going to be very good, or it won't be as good as it should be.

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

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.

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.

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.

Imagination continually frustrates tradition; that is its function.