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.

Be warned against all 'good' advice because 'good' advice is necessarily 'safe' advice, and though it will undoubtedly follow a sane pattern, it will very likely lead one into total sterility--one of the crushing problems of our time.

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.

Imagination continually frustrates tradition; that is its function.

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.

We want playmates we can own.

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.