I decided I was going to tell these stories. I went around and met Crumb. He was the cartoonist. I started realizing comics weren't just kid stuff.

I think the people who would be the least interested in my work would be people who read lots of comic books.

It seemed to me you could do anything in comics. So I started doing my thing, which is mainly influenced by novelists, stand-up comedians, that sort of thing.

Everybody's like everybody else, and everybody's different from everybody else.

My work looks like a comic book in form, but it's not a typical comic book in content. I write autobiographical stuff.

I really don't have a lot in common with the people who attend the Comic Con. It's like assuming that all people who write prose are the same.

I'd been familiar with comics, and I'd collected 'em when I was a kid, but after I got into junior high school, there wasn't much I was interested in.

Things improved a little bit in the '80s; there was kind of a revival of alternative comics, but then they went downhill in the '90s.

I decided I was going to tell these stories. I went around and met Crumb. He was the cartoonist. I started realizing comics weren't just kid stuff.

I'm doing research for a large comic book on the Beat Generation guys - Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and those guys.

It's extremely seldom that anybody wants me to change what I've written about them. Generally I portray them in a good light, if they're friends.

The film's success so far involves winning a couple of prizes at Cannes and Sundance, and getting some very nice reviews in newspapers and magazines. That hasn't had a big impact on my life yet.

Letterman... he got his problems. We don't get along too well.

I continue to be disappointed that people don't try and diversify the kind of work they are doing in comics.

I don't write about certain arguments I have with my wife. I'd get my head torn off if wrote about certain things.

I think you can do anything with comics that you could do in just about any art form.

I think comics have far more potential than a lot of people realize.

I came up with American Splendor. Some people think it's American Squalor.

It didn't take long to establish myself, as far as people thinking my work was good. They liked it from the start.

People writing about me have said that I've influenced a lot of people, and there are some artists who have credited me with influencing them.

I write scripts in storyboard fashion using stick figures, and thought balloons and word balloons and captions. Then I'll write descriptions of what scenes should look like and turn it over to the artist.

There hasn't been enough change in comics to suit me. I don't know why exactly.

Plays have been made of my comics.

People who are readers of fiction aren't particularly interested in comic books.

I've probably had my day in the sun. I think I've influenced a lot of comic book writers.

I met Robert Crumb in 1962; he lived in Cleveland for a while. I took a look at his stuff. Crumb was doing stuff beyond what other writers and artists were doing. It was a step beyond Mad.

I try and write the way things happen. I don't try and fulfill people's wishes.

I thought I had a great opportunity when I started doing my comic book in 1972. I thought there was so much territory to work in.

American Splendor is just an ongoing journal. It's an ongoing autobiography. I started it when I was in my early 30s, and I just keep going.

It makes you feel good to know that there's other people afflicted like you.

I'm a guy that likes to sit in one place.

As a matter of fact, I deliberately look for the mundane, because I feel these stories are ignored. The most influential things that happen to virtually all of us are the things that happen on a daily basis. Not the traumas.

Cleveland has a very bad reputation, but there's a lot of stuff that's left over from when there were very wealthy people - the Art Museum and a world class symphony that's still world class.

I can't write in a whole lot of different styles, trying to please the highbrows one time and the lowbrows the next. I pretty much have a basic style I employ.

I don't mind if I show myself being cheap or unreasonable sometimes.

I don't want to play myself up as a hero, because it would make me unbelievable. I'd rather settle for people thinking that I'm a bum, but digging my stories, than liking me and not being able to believe in my stories. That's one reason I've been hard on myself, because I want my stuff to be believable.

I guess I wanted to show people, among other things, that you don't have to be a hero to get through cancer. You can be a craven coward and get through. You have to stay on your medication and take your treatments, that's all.

I have to be a freelance writer for the rest of my life, unless I get some kind of real lucky break. But other than that, I'll always have to work. I always worry about whether my stuff is going to get over. Will they like this, will they like that?

I kept on buying records and listening to them. Finally, I was able to hear the relationship between the jazz improvisers' solos and the underlying structure that it's based on, the chord progression. That was pretty easy to do in the swing era, y'know, when jazz was, like, pop music, you know. It had made the charts and everything like that.

I think you can find all the elements that you can find in great literature in mundane experiences.

I wake up every morning in a cold sweat, regardless of how well things went the day before. And put that I said that in a somewhat but not completely tongue-in-cheek way.

I was influenced by autobiographical writers like Henry Miller, and I had actually done some autobiographical prose. But I just thought that comics were like virgin territory. There was so much to be done. It excited me. I couldn't draw very well. I could write scripts and storyboard style using stick figures and balloons and captions.

I was sort of on a mission with 'American Splendor.' I wanted to try to prove that comics could do things. I wanted to expand them beyond superheroes and talking animals. And I knew that was going to take a long time. But I just started writing an autobiography about my quotidian life.

I worry about getting work, and then when I get it, I worry about doing it well. I don't want to just go through the motions and give people stuff. This stuff is really important to me.

I'd like to see the comics' style expanded. I'd like to see artists synthesize traditional comics arts style with fine-arts styles or whatever. I like to see innovation. I don't like it when an art form becomes stagnant.

I'm from the beatnik generation, where everybody wanted to be a poet or writer or something. And at that time, I was a jazz critic, and I was always thinking, theorizing about what makes great art or what's important in art.

I'm just tired of people saying I'm a self-hating Jew because I'm critical of Israel or make fun of old Jewish ladies. I do not hate myself. And Jews who criticize Israel aren't necessarily mentally ill.

I'm kind of concerned about 'Ego & Hubris' because I'm thinking that people will read it and maybe even be entertained by it, but at the end of it, you know, they'll wonder, 'Why did this guy write this? What was the point of it?'

I'm trying to get every man involved in art, into experimental music, or painting, or novel-writing.