“The loner – it can have a real impact on the art when they realize, I have friends, I’m married, or I have kids. That’s certainly happened to me.”

Look, there’s no denying that comics have moved dramatically into the mainstream in North American culture in the last 10 years.

I never go home and take out those business cards and go to those websites.

But if there was a mini-comic here in my hand, I’d read it while I ate my lunch.

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.

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

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.