I guess I didn't enjoy drawing very much. It was like homework.

When people say 'What are underground comics?' I think the best way you can define them is just the absolute freedom involved... we didn't have anyone standing over us.

Most of my adult life I had this towering contempt for America.

Everything that is strong in me has gone into my art work.

I guess I didn't enjoy drawing very much. It was like homework.

The only burning passion I'm sure I have, is the passion for sex.

I moved further and further away from mass entertainment. The sexual element became increasingly sinister and bizarre. Don't blame me! The bastards drove me to it! They all backed off after that!

I felt so painfully isolated that I vowed I would get revenge on the world by becoming a famous cartoonist.

Killing yourself is a major commitment, it takes a kind of courage. Most people just lead lives of cowardly desperation. It's kinda half suicide where you just dull yourself with substances.

I have always had an abiding interest in that type of female anatomy.

Oh, yes. I knew I was weird by the time I was four. I knew I wasn't like other boys. I knew I was more fearful. I didn't like the rough and tumble most boys were into. I knew I was a sissy.

When I come up against the real world, I just vacillate.

I do covers for CDs and LPs of music that I like, reissues of old-time music, and then I'm inspired to make some kind of drawing based on this love of the music. I don't do album covers or CD covers for groups or musicians I don't like or have no interest in.

I use the old Strathmore vellum surface paper, which is the best paper you can get in the Western world for ink line drawing. It has a good, hard surface.

I would call myself a Gnostic. Which means, I'm interested in pursuing and understanding the spiritual nature of things. A Gnostic is somebody seeking knowledge of that aspect of reality.

I'm into old-time music; I'm not very interested in modern, popular music at all. And if I'm really into some particular old-time musician, some fiddler or banjo player, I'm always dying of curiosity to see what they look like. So there's some connection between visual images and music.

In my midteens I went through a brief stage of religious fanaticism, but it was very much about just saying prayers and stuff like that, reciting rosaries and spending a lot of time on that kind of Catholic ritual.

Pictures have a lot more power than text. Text is just a bunch of little symbols. You have to actually read it and imagine it, and even that can be censored. With pictures, it's a lot more immediate.

Some things I won't do for any amount of money. Like for instance, there's a couple of CEOs of very large corporations that offered me lots of money to do special pictures for them. And I just refused to do that. Even if it was a million dollars I wouldn't do it.

The Bible was not written for entertainment purposes, so it's a real hodgepodge and a compendium of all kinds of stuff.

The French hold onto their traditions. I was always so alienated in America. My work was this constant reaction to that.

There's many heroic underappreciated investigative journalists.

Violence begets violence, and then you get leaders who are violent men. And you don't want that.

When I go back to America, after a few days I am once again filled with this kind of angry alienation and disgust with this thing there that America has got - you have no idea how pervasive it is there. The public relations and propaganda put out by the corporate mono-culture there is so pervasive.

With comics, you've got to develop some kind of shorthand. You can't make every drawing look like a detailed etching. The average reader actually doesn't want all that detail; it interferes with the flow of the reading process.

You don't have to be a Fundamentalist Christian to be interested in the Bible. It's really a fascinating mythology.

You must thank the gods for art, those of us who have been fortunate enough to stumble onto this means of venting our craziness, our meanness, our towering disgust.

If you look for me, I'm in the fiction section. Romance has its own section.

People say it's cathartic to write a book, but it turned out to be quite painful!

You can be in Tokyo or Alberta at four in the morning in your hotel and you can still practice if you feel like it. A trombone cannot do that at four in the morning.

The problem for me, still today, is that I write purely with one dramatic structure and that is the rite of passage. I'm not really skilled in any other. Rock and roll itself can be described as music to accompany the rite of passage.

Wallace and Gromit's contraptions are created purely for gags, but we all have the urge to invent - especially children. If they're bored, kids will make something from cardboard boxes, yoghurt pots, tape and elastic bands. Often, those constructions are the best.

Maybe studios don't want to see women acting in a way that isn't womanly. Maybe people don't.

Ultimately it doesn't matter whether you go forwards or backwards: you need to live your life as well as you can.

I didn't choose Paris. I like to think that the city chose me.

I was a regular on 'Holby City,' and I did daytime; that's how I started off. Off in Hong Kong doing stuntman stuff, then coming back to England doing daytime soap operas.

The easy way out is to increase taxes.

Never was a faithful prayer lost. Some prayers have a longer voyage than others, but then they return with their richer lading at last, so that the praying soul is a gainer by waiting for an answer.

Let me commit some mistakes Perfection is not which I crave for. Let me live the way I want Certification is not which I crave for. Let me be me the real me Duplication is not which I crave for. Let me flaunt myself the way I am Covering is not which I crave for.

I've been all different shapes and sizes in my lifetime. I started wearing shapewear as a teenager after I did 'Australian Idol.' I had a little tummy, and I was always really quite conscious of that.

I am joy.

No worse fate can befall a young man or woman than becoming prematurely entrenched in prudence and negation.

I pinch myself because of the understanding that I've been blessed with a real rare opportunity that few Americans ever get - to serve their government and their people at this level.

Youre so haunted by other peoples futures that you forget the only future you cannot see is your own.

The science of psychology has been far more successful on the negative than on the positive side... It has revealed to us much about man's shortcomings, his illnesses, his sins, but little about his potentialities, his virtues, his achievable aspirations, or his psychological health.

I'm a solid Labour party supporter. I aspired to be a Labour MP, but it's difficult to make the leap from the Foreign Office.

Be content to remember that those who can make omelettes properly can do nothing else.

I've won a championship on every level except the NBA. It's frustrating to have not gotten that in the first two years.

I'd love to open a restaurant that changes every month. One month it would be a mom and bar spaghetti-and-meatball, Red Sox place, and the next it would be a British pub, and everyone gets in a fight.