It's embarrassing to be involved in the same business as the mainstream comic thing. It's still very embarrassing to tell other adults that I draw comic books - their instant, preconceived notions of what that means.

I must have been 3 years old or less, and I remember paging through these comics, trying to figure out the stories. I couldn't read the words, so I made up my own stories.

You can give some kind of spark of life to a comic that a photograph doesn't really have. A photograph, even if it's connecting with you, it seems very dead on the page sometimes.

I have this certain vision of the way I want my comics to look; this sort of photographic realism, but with a certain abstraction that comics can give. It's kind of a fine line.

When you see somebody who's got a complaining personality, it usually means that they had some vision of what things could be, and they're constantly disappointed by that. I think that would be the camp that I would fall into - constantly horrified by the things people do.

I love the medium and I love individual comics, but the business is nothing I would be proud of.

I was a very fearful little kid, and I would always see the worst in everything. The glass was half-empty. I would see people kissing, and I would think one was trying to bite the other.

It's embarrassing to be involved in the same business as the mainstream comic thing. It's still very embarrassing to tell other adults that I draw comic books - their instant, preconceived notions of what that means.

Even if I only had 10 readers, I'd rather do the book for them than for a million readers online.

For example, I noticed that every single kid in the high school in 'The Death-Ray' is based on somebody I went to high school with.

I don't read much of anything online.

I had no television when I was little, just a stack of old, beat-up comics from the 1950s and 1960s.

I tend to be the type who is overly polite and sort of ingratiating to other people.

I think I've had the fantasy of a ray-gun that could erase the world from the time I was a very little kid.

I think that's what we're all most terrified about: that we'll just die and disappear and we'll leave no trace.

I try personally not to be nostalgic.

I was 30 before I made a living that was not embarrassing.

I'm a fan of parchment and wood pulp.

I'm more interested in characters who are a little difficult.

I'm not opposed to comics on the Internet. It's just not interesting to me.

Nobody else feels the same way about your dog that you do.

People seem to need a likable protagonist more than ever.

Superman's always chasing after someone who just mugged somebody, and I've never seen that happen in my life.

That's the biggest part of doing comics: You have to create stuff that makes you want to get out of bed every morning and get to work.

Try letting a Kindle protect your heart from sniper fire!

Working on movies made me realize how fluid the medium of film was.

Yeah, I don't necessarily like endings that contrive an artificial moment of completion.

I was thinking the other day that there will never be another form of music that everybody has to respond to like disco.

You can never really trust someone who remembers every embarrassing detail of your adolescence.

There were a lot of adventure books for boys, historical novels by Kenneth Roberts, and whatever mystery novels the alarmed librarian imagined might not corrupt an eager but innocent youth.

It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds. In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours.

It is the interest one takes in books that makes a library. And if a library have interest it is; if not, it isn't.

I enjoy about 1 out of 100 movies, it's about the same proportion to books published that I care to read.

I was drawn to boxing because I got beat up as a kid. I was the kid with the piano books in a New York neighbourhood.

It's clear to me that there is no good reason for many philosophy books to sound as complicated as they do.

The proper study of mankind is books.

I have written about 10 books, all just practical encouragement for moms.

Whites were the winners, blacks were the losers, we wrote the history books, and they didn't feature.

Good books, like good friends, are few and chosen; the more select, the more enjoyable.

You could say, in a vulgar Freudian way, that I am the unhappy child who escapes into books. Even as a child, I was most happy being alone. This has not changed.

Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist.

As I have studied the Bible and the Book of Mormon, I have come to know through the power of the Spirit of God, that these books contain the fullness of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

There are some friends you don't meet for twenty years and when you meet them again it's as if no twenty years has happened - you're lucky when that happens. I feel the same about books.

Then I found books that were written much later, as late as 15 years ago. It was very superficial material, but enough to tell me that the genesis of this story was worth exploring.

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.

Well, it was actually - I brought the idea of doing a documentary to HBO back in 2000, when there were some press reports sort of were bandied about that there were going to TV movies based on some of the books that were out.

In my subconscious, my books were part of a single emotional journey.

I get letters from readers who say that they have always hated reading, but somebody suggested one of my books, they actually finished the book and enjoyed it, and they're going on to read another book. I'm thrilled that they have figured out that reading is fun.

I never buy magazines, I never even buy books.