I Stress Character, Character, Character.

What Is The Point Of It All? Not Leaving Legacies. But Being Ripe. Being Ripe.

Art Has Always Been My Salvation. And My Gods Are Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Mozart. I Believe In Them With All My Heart. And When Mozart Is Playing In My Room, I Am In Conjunction With Something I Can’t Explain — I Don’t Need To. I Know That If There’s A Purpose For Life, It Was For Me To Hear Mozart. Or If I Walk In The Woods And I See An Animal, The Purpose Of My Life Was To See That Animal. I Can Recollect It, I Can Notice It. I’m Here To Take Note Of. And That Is Beyond My Ego, Beyond Anything That Belongs To Me, An Observer, An Observer.

I'm Getting Old. And I'm Disappointed In Everything Just The Way Old People Traditionally, Boringly Are. That Bothers Me Because Is It Too Traditional? Am I Not Fighting Hard Enough? I Don't Feel The Fight. I Don't Feel It.

An Illustrator In My Own Mind - And This Is Not A Truth Of Any Kind - Is Someone Who So Falls In Love With Writing That He Wishes He Had Written It, And The Closest He Can Get To Is Illustrating It. And The Next Thing You Learn, You Have To Find Something Unique In This Book, Which Perhaps Even The Author Was Not Entirely Aware Of. And That's What You Hold On To, And That's What You Add To The Pictures: A Whole Other Story That You Believe In, That You Think Is There.

I Mean, Being A Child Was Being A Child, Was Being A Creature Without Power, Without Pocket Money, Without Escape Routes Of Any Kind. So I Didn't Want To Be A Child.