What social media has done - Facebook, Twitter - is show the audience. I don't have an audience. When I make my work, it just goes out into the ether. I have a thick skin and it just brings me down to earth, you know, to realize how out-there and far away and paltry the audience is that gets what I'm saying. It's depressing if I let it get to me. And it's the same with hanging a show, the way it's put up, like, three stories high and you can't read a single word.

I wouldn't want to be defined so much by comics or cartoons. My work is more narrative than that. If you take your basic cartoon, there's always a punchline or a joke at the end. My drawings don't depend on that so much.

I'm not God, but I'm working within my own means as an artist and a person, and I possibly have more power than God does, in whatever form he has, if he exists, because I can work without the overarching ambition of wanting to rule over everything. I can work just for the heck of it.

I was very influenced by comics. The drawing style, definitely, I was interested in. My style of drawing is largely a comic style, but it's also much more obvious than comics.

It's very rare that someone gets the death penalty for charges of conspiracy, for his influence, for his Svengali-Rasputin act.

Anyone living, especially your peers, is a threat. You're judging them, they're judging you. This sort of criticism is as close to human nature as you can get. That can be a good thing sometimes. Jealously, rancor, competition, those can be good things in art. But it mostly puts you in a dangerous and disadvantageous position, and one that just takes away from you so much.

In communist Russia, their major organ was Pravda, which means "truth." The Russians knew how to read between the lines. They didn't take their literature literally.