My parents were extremely reluctant. When my father was clearly dying, my mother refused to acknowledge it.

You would open a drawer, which my father had jammed full of newspapers, and the bottom would drop out. There were buttons and screws and nails and bottle caps and jar lids – the drawer of jar lids! Why? Because they're made of metal and maybe there'll be another war and we'll need the metal. A friend of mine – I quote him in the book – says, 'You have found the source of the river eBay.'

I used to love to draw things that made me laugh or made friends laugh. When I was 13 or 14, I started thinking, This is what I like to do more than anything else.

The fact that cartoons are reproduced doesn't mean anything to me as far as whether they are "real art" or not.

I think when you really love something, you notice the minutiae.

Grime is not like messiness or some fingerprints on a cabinet; it takes a long time to accumulate.

I noticed that I used to go to second hand shops and flea markets and find funny, cute things, but now I go into those stores, and I think, This is dead people's stuff. This is all, like, somebody cleaned out their parents' house, and I don't want any of it. If I didn't want it from my parents, I don't want it from your parents.