Seriously, if you want to get inside the head of a stand-up comic, you could do a lot worse than reading Steve Martin's Born Standing Up, all about how he developed his career and his creativity as a comedian. Lots of what he talks about is relevant to anyone in the creative arts - you find yourself, your voice, your technique and then maybe luck calls.

The comic-book industry today is not what it was back then, unfortunately. Kids are no longer interested in reading comic books; they've got television and the electronic games that they can bury themselves in like ostriches. They don't have to pay attention to what's going on in the world around them.

The heart is the only book worth reading.

You have to give your art everything you can - I don't mean only writing, but studying other poets and poetics, thinking, reading what poets have written other than their poetry.

I was very aware of the fact that there are a lot of comics out there that I love, because I've grown up my whole life reading comics and I know every little nuance of the language and all the implications.

For me, like, the more interesting a letter is I just get more excited and I know that this going to be great for my friends who are looking forward to reading that in my comic.

The first time I did a reading/signing thing at Cody's, the woman who did the introduction said something like that, and I wasn't the only one cringing. I remember looking out into the audience and seeing people's faces and people whispering to each other, and thinking like "Ugh, can we just cancel the whole thing? I can't go out there after she said that."

The experience of reading a comic should not be the time it takes to turn each page.

From all these experiences the most important thing I have learned is that legibility and beauty stand close together and that type design, in its restraint, should be only felt but not perceived by the reader.

Perhaps the greatest lesson [Huxley] learned from reading Carlyle was that real religion, that emotive feeling for Truth and Beauty, could flourish in the absence of an idolatrous theology.