“Just in terms of being able to be a professional artist, but also it’s nice to not have to dread introductions.”

I wanted to avoid doing what I thought people wanted me to do.

The idea of trying to make the effort to produce something, to put something out into the world, rather than just taking in all the stuff the world’s putting out at you.

I do think it’s getting more and more rare in this country to raise a kid with the attitude that creativity is something valuable.

And I do think it’s sort of too bad that what once was a safe haven for truly eccentric, outsider artists is no longer that thing.

I think there’s a lot of evolution that’s happened in intangible ways, in terms of how I think about the work or how I plan it out.

Either thought balloons or narrations or some sort of showy action, then those thoughts and realizations never existed.

There’s been a lot of progress recently. And I shouldn’t make a definitive statement about this.

The experience of reading a comic should not be the time it takes to turn each page.

When email and the Internet came along, I never publish an email address. I just stuck with this P.O. Box address.

There are certain artists and filmmakers who, I get the impression, are trying to show off how bad their characters can be, how immoral their characters can be.

I’m very grateful for it. But at the same time, it’s not a subculture-y thing anymore; it’s something that’s in the New York Times and the New Yorker.

It’s psychologically a weird experience to be so aware of the fact that the real time of your life is moving much faster than the fictional time you’re trying to depict.

I sense a real difference in my work from the time I was younger and single and more involved in the world of music and going out to bars and all that.

I think a lot of the criticism had to do with disliking the characters – which, again, I take as something of a compliment.

For me, like, the more interesting a letter is I just get more excited and I know that this going to be great for my friends who are looking forward to reading that in my comic.

I think in terms of getting new artists who are not in that sort of stereotypical teenage boy demographic.

Putting a label [homosexual] on myself was a big step forward…once I said, ‘Yes, that’s me, that’s what I am,’ I was able to work with it.

If all we are allowed is hours, minutes, I want to be able to etch each of them on to my memory with exquisite clarity so that I can recall them at moments like this, when my very soul feels blackened.

Once you start rewriting, you’re not able to stop. With each draft the fundamental banality and worthlessness of the material becomes more evident even as its vitality and spontaneity are drained from it.

If you are able to explain suffering, a man once told him, you weren’t really there.

You never know what’s going to happen. That’s why I like acting. It’s precious to me to be able to live more than one life.

No doubt that the U.S. is a super-power capable of conquering a relatively small country, but is it able to control it?

They appear to have become so attached to their outrage that they are even more outraged that they won’t be able to be outraged anymore.

By being able to write a genome and plug it into an organism, the software, if you will, changes the hardware.