It's about communication, no matter how impossibly hard your art is to understand and how much of an ivory tower or high horse you get on, it's still basically communication or why are you doing it?

Puppets allow a person to express things through this surrogate that wouldn't normally get expressed. You know there's famous techniques of puppet therapists. Put this hand puppet on and tell me what the problem is.

If they make the deadline because the Shiites and Kurds essentially rammed a draft through over Sunni Arab objections, there will be hell to pay.

All I do is work, that's all my life is work.

I wanted to deconstruct the puppet show. I wanted to turn it inside out and do stuff that you're not supposed to do. I didn't want it to be gentle like most puppet shows tend to be, since they come from childhood where you're gently trying to tell a story. I wanted to blast all that out of the water. I think there's plenty of room of any kind of attitude toward puppets. I call puppeteering acting while hiding.

I'm probably the worst person in the world to give advice to puppeteers. My whole attitude towards puppets from the beginning was not one of love, but it was like anti-puppetry.

Follow your heart, and your pleasure in art. Don’t do what you think is going to be making you money, or what you’re parents want you to do, or what that beautiful girl or guy thinks you should be doing. Do what you love. It’s going to lead to where you want to go. Go out there and make the world more beautiful. I know you can.