"I do obsess endlessly over every single detail in my stuff, even though I draw very fast. But I can re-draw the same chair 100 times until it’s just right. And that doesn’t mean it has to be a beautiful chair or a particularly stylish chair, but the chair has to be as perfect as the sentence it replaces. I don’t do thumbnail sketches, I don’t plan my books like a normal cartoonist. I usually write them like you would write a novel. And then I replace all the sentences with sequences (laughs). Which is pretty stupid, and people who know me sometimes say ‘why don’t you just write a novel?’ But then I think ‘well, that’s the sort of thing that one would do’."

"Well, I’m well-read for a cartoonist. (laughs) I think any writer should, first and foremost, be an extremely good reader. Whatever you write is secondary. And I think pretty much every great writer conforms to that. I gave up drawing for about half a year, almost entirely, and I just read a lot. And then I thought ‘well this is the sort of thing that I want to do, but I can make it interesting for myself and try to translate these ideas of constraints and short experimental writing into drawing’. That was a ‘Eureka!’ moment for me. Suddenly everything made sense. People would tell me later on ‘oh you were fine, then suddenly you became excellent. What happened?’ ‘Well, I stopped drawing’ (laughs) That was the best thing I’ve ever done. So I always tell my students ‘when in doubt, just stop doing what you’re doing’. The worst thing you can do is just plow through."