I don't like to be second in anything. I was trying, I just wasn't going anywhere.
I try to separate my personal life from swimming.
If you blithely do what you do and you're good at what you do, and try to be a decent person, you can succeed.
One day I was just looking at the coins is what brought this up. I saw "In God We Trust" on my coins. I said, "I don't trust in God," what is this? And I recalled there was something in the Constitution that said you're not allowed to do that and so I did some research. And as soon as I did the research, I realized the law seemed to be on my side and I filed the suit. It's a cool thing to do. Everyone should try it.
Don't try to run your life through a single straw. Someone, some event, will cut it off.
When I write I try as far as possible to forget I'm writing it at all. I tell it down onto the page, as if I'm telling it to one person only, my best friend.
But try as I might, I never got to eat any of her pastries, and do you know, she never even offered me one.
The 'fiscal cliff' is a ruse, an invention by the right and the rich, to try and keep their huge tax breaks.
A common denominator among big guys like me who are trying to take care of our health is that we're not getting enough sleep.
I was taught from a very early age that it was probably the most American thing you can do is to question what's going on and to try to fix things that you see that aren't right. I believed that as a young person, and I believe that today.
Take cyber-capabilities. We have way more cyber-capability than Russia do. We could intervene in their elections easily. We choose not to do so because we're a different country. That's what Obama was trying to say.
Trump has got to define what he seeks to achieve with Russia, and then use diplomacy and sometimes coercion to achieve those ends. Right now, aside from this fight with ISIS, which I would underscore, you know, the Obama administration has been trying to fight ISIS with Russia for several years now.
The American political system is so porous, it's so open, it's so frustrating for those who are trying to make policy.
I mean these are universal themes. I try not to preach, for sure. I don't enjoy movies that preach - so I don't want to preach myself when I tell stories because I just feel all of these themes are built into us in terms of redemption and mercy and love and compassion and all these things. And the negative sides, as well.
That's how I've made a living for years: doing illustrations for comics and magazines. And I'm still doing it. Though I'm really trying to make efforts to have other career choices, because it's just so unstable.
In early comics, you see the amazing awkwardness and bizarre reasoning in the storyline, and it's because comics hadn't really been invented yet. There was no format for them to follow. They were just making it up. So I try to incorporate that kind of awkwardness in my comics quite frequently, which is odd. In some ways, I can't be as awkward as I'd like. But I do think that's one way in which my comics are unusual, because I will try to make the artwork look bad, occasionally.
What I'm trying to do with Thrizzle is create the experience of a humor magazine, even if it's just one person. So that's involved me trying to simulate different styles and create a feeling of some contrast and variation, which is obviously very different from Snake 'N' Bacon.
Certainly I enjoy the outré and I enjoy artistic comics and surrealism in comics very much. But the decision I made and have stuck with and refined was the decision to try to be funny and communicate humor. Once you put that ahead of everything else, it resolves those other questions for you.
Get out and about. Rather than going to the same gym and doing the same thing, it's a good opportunity to try different things.
It is really really important that you deal with Trump either by letter or by personal contact. Trying to deal with him on telephones or through the media is not a good idea.
We all have three characters: the one we really have, the one we try to convince the world we have, and the one we think we have.
I feel no obligation to teach my readers anything, to impart any sort of wisdom, to teach any sort of lesson, to instill any sort of morality. All I'm trying to do is make them and their parents laugh.
I thought I'd be living a much more bohemian life and be very poor. I never thought I'd do comedy or be married living in the suburbs. Every time I try to plan my life out it just doesn't come to pass, and I think that's a great experience.
Hosting a game show is so bizarre and uniquely its own thing. Anytime I'm hosting something, I try to bring as much of myself to it as I can, but it's always going to be incomplete.
Things you never thought were going to turn into something end up being the most important things in your life. You have to learn to not try to control it.
