Cartoons, often, that you do for the New Yorker don't appear for months afterwards, and the record for that is a cartoon that was bought by James Stevenson in 1987 and didn't appear until 2000.

Cartoons are like fruit flies. Biologists use fruit flies because their large chromosomes and short life cycle make them ideal for studying hereditary changes.

I'm very fond of the strictly visual cartoons I did when I was breaking in in the 1970's. Over time I migrated to a more verbal approach.

I think The New Yorker's cartoons aren't very political because the people who do the cartoons aren't awfully political people, and they aren't paid to be political. I think editorial cartoonists are. That's what they do. They probably have a great natural interest in politics, and then they are paid to do it, so they sort of have to hunt out these ideas. I admire editorial cartoons, but I'm also sort of happy that I don't do them because I'd hate to have to label things and I'd especially hate, more than anything, to label something Dennis Hastert or Mark Foley.

The generations that were exposed to sitcom have the people actually saying the line, saying the joke, whereas sort of before that you have much more observational humor.

I think what Jewish culture taught me and what the - and Jewish culture now is everyone's culture - is all these embarrassing things, all these guilt-filled things, all these anxiety filled things are material.

Each cartoon needs the right amount of wrong.