“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 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.

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.

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

For a stretch of time, I got really caught up in the idea that what people liked about my work was that I was a young guy.

Especially for people of our generation, who really celebrated certain attitudes – the outsider.

I wouldn’t overall say that “The Diagnosis” is a funny book. I would say that it has comic moments. It’s a modern tragedy.

Rage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.

Did you know I started out as a stand-up comic? People don’t believe me when I tell them. That’s how I saw myself, in comedy.

Seriously, if you want to get inside the head of a stand-up comic, you could do a lot worse than reading Steve Martin’s Born Standing Up.

The comic-book industry today is not what it was back then, unfortunately. Kids are no longer interested in reading comic books.

The method of producing comics in Japan is very hectic, but it’s also rewarding because it’s possible to do both the story and art all by yourself. In this way,

Underground and alternative comics existed in a vacuum for years, where money really wasn’t an issue.

No one would get into doing a black-and-white comic because they thought it might be a route to riches.