Which has left me with a healthy respect and fondness for higher education that those of my friends and family who attended universities were cured of long ago.
My guiltiest pleasure is Harry Stephen Keeler. He may have been the greatest bad writer America has ever produced. Or perhaps the worst great writer. I do not know. There are few faults you can accuse him of that he is not guilty of. But I love him.
And there never was an apple, in Adam's opinion, that wasn't worth the trouble you got into for eating it.
Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and adventures are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgotten.
I'll agonize over sentences. Mostly because you're trying to create specific effects with sentences, and because there are a number of different voices in the book.
Anything that keeps you happy and writing is part of my writing ritual: I like music, so I tend to have it playing in the background. But if I'm interested, I can write in an airport waiting areas.
So the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is out there preserving and fighting for, and sometimes winning and sometimes losing, the fight for First Amendment rights in comics and, more generally, for freedom of speech.
The only people I ever get irritated with are the ones who announce, using my Twitter handle, that they are no longer following me and why.
I've known ambitious people with no aptitude for the thing they did. Most of whom, rather terrifyingly, tended to succeed.
I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect.
So I went out and bought myself a copy of the Writer and Artist Yearbook, bought lots of magazines and got on the phone and talked to editors about ideas for stories. Pretty soon I found myself hired to do interviews and articles and went off and did them.
Also, I've already won all the awards.
Great, big, serious novels always get awards. If it's a battle between a great, big, serious novel and a funny novel, the funny novel is doomed.
It's not a bad thing for a writer not to feel at home. Writers - we're much more comfortable at parties standing in the corner watching everybody else having a good time than we are mingling.
It's a wonderful thing, as a writer, to be given parameters and walls and barriers.
The great thing about Batman and Superman, in truth, is that they are literally transcendent. They are better than most of the stories they are in.
We all not only could know everything. We do. We just tell ourselves we don't to make it all bearable.
I had started to feel that somewhere in the second half of the 20th century, the idea of page-turning as a good thing had been lost. You were getting books that were the equivalent of absolutely beautifully prepared dishes of food that didn't taste like anything much.
The biggest difference between England and America is that England has history, while America has geography.
I've been blogging since February of 2001. When I started blogging, it was a dinosaur blog. It was me and a handful of tyrannosaurs. We'd be writing blog entries like, 'The tyrannosaurus is getting grumpy.'