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I don't feel that I have to control every aspect of things that I appear in. You learn a lot performing someone else's writing.

I prefer drawing the things I've written to handing them off to another artist. Turns out I'm a huge control freak - and because I write in thumbnails, the art is already happening by the time I start writing!

When I'm writing the text for a book like 'Little White Rabbit,' I read it aloud, alone, in my studio, again and again and again - because the rhythm has to be exactly right. After I get my manuscript to the point where I think it is perfect, I begin to think about what I want the art to look like.

I don't think of myself as an artist. I'm just a guy who can write.

When I started writing, I was a great rationalist and believed I was absolutely in control. But the older one gets, the more confused, and for an artist I think that is quite a good thing: you allow in more of your instinctual self; your dreams, fantasies and memories. It's richer, in a way.

I paint very messy. I throw paint around. So when I let myself do the same sort of thing with my writing, and I would just write and write and write and revise, that's when I found my rhythm in writing.

You have to write badly to write at all. If it's crappy, I will rewrite it later. But it will be mine. You can hear the resonance of an artist who goes into herself.

To me, writing is a matter of voice. I think like that. The expression I sometimes use to myself is 'actual song.' That what I do is somewhere on the line between speaking to you as I am now and actual song. And the things I love when I say one of those poems to myself - it's a little bit like singing, it's a little bit like speaking.

Writing is communication, and you don't know how you're doing until you put it in front of someone else's eyes. You also learn from critiquing other writers' work.

As an artist, you never want to write the same song again, you always want to challenge yourself to writing in a different way.