In the Depression, besides everybody being poor, our entertainment was much more primitive and innocent. The comic strip, which I so venerated, was still a very new form. Movies had just become talkies. Radio had just gone coast to coast for the first time. Network radio had just begun when I was a kid. So all of these forms were more or less in their infancy, and feeling their oats. Comics were fresh and funny and nervy, and in a sense, defiant of the prevailing culture.

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.

And all the things I thought were mistakes and I did cartoons on them. And then I think I was the first cartoonist in the country to attack the war in Viet Nam and that helped influence a whole generation of young cartoonists who later on took up the battle. And that was exciting to know that I had helped influence work of young people who were moving this forum into a better and more exciting area, out of the more by the state that political cartooning had been in.

There's no rap against comics that isn't true. They were sexist, they were racist, you name it - and they kind of gloried in that.

I told the doctor I was overtired, anxiety-ridden, compulsively active, constantly depressed, with recurring fits of paranoia. Turns out I'm normal.

Imagination continually frustrates tradition; that is its function.

When I write a play, my whole intent at bottom is to get the audience to be in the cast, to get that audience on stage with the actors and to get them thoroughly involved in what's going on.