A tree is an incomprehensible mystery.

I’ve often thought I would like to try to write a conventional novel, but I just don’t know enough about the real world to write one.

The books that I do, the stories I write – I’m glad I’m able to do them, but they will quickly be swallowed up by the sands of time. Sometimes it frustrates me that I’m not able to do bigger, more important, more significant things. I guess you have to be content to do whatever it is you can do.

Cartoons are perhaps a bigger part of art than is generally realized, and they influence people in ways that are not always recognized. But creating a monumental work of architecture, or writing a great symphony, is something else. It’s a higher order of creation.

When I was a kid, I used to see apparitions and have hallucinations, and my entire perception of the world was badly disoriented. And I had kind of a chaotic childhood because of that. I’ve really hung onto it, though. Because I actually like those feelings.

I wanted to be a pariah, because all my heroes were cult artists, people who devoted their lives to poking into very narrow, very deep corners – Erik Satie, Alfred Jarry, Malcolm Lowry – people who suffered in order to express their vision of life.

That Moorish architecture is all over the place, of course. It affects me everywhere I see it, as it does so many people. But Brand Library was a special place to me, and I know I’ve paid homage to it many times in my drawings.

I think that cartoons have a lot more power than they’re given credit for.

Every time I write something down I check it to see if it has that telltale glow, the glow that tells me there’s something there. If it glows, it stays. Everything is either on or off.

The fiction I tend to like is nothing like my own work. I like the kind of writing that shows me things I don’t know about, and what I don’t know about is the everyday, normal world.