My first book was called, 'Mountain, Get Out of My Way,' where I did an autobiographical sketch, if you will, looking back at myself and looking back at things in my life, and juxtaposing them against things that are happening in other people's lives...
I didn't know much about Texas when I moved there for graduate school. In my first or second semester, I took a class in life and literature of the Southwest, and that's where I first heard about these events along the border in 1915-1918, what Anglo...
It's tempting to just write a comic called 'Everyone Mail Randall Munroe Twenty Bucks' - maybe it would work, and I could just close down the 'xkcd' store and sit on a beach and draw pictures and make snarky Reddit posts for the rest of my life.
We aren't upset when Paramount makes a $200 million movie that flops, but if a charity experiments with a $5 million fundraising event that fails, we call in the attorneys. So charities are petrified of trying bold new revenue-generating endeavors an...
The bulk of my learning - if I may call it such - has come within the past three months, after I became a part of the fragile body of patients who make up an AIDS hospice. Here, surrounded by teams of supportive nurses, attentive doctors, and interns...
Any relationship should have love, and if there is no love, it is better to call off a relationship. People say that love happens only once, but I don't believe in it because for me, if one relationship doesn't work, you should move on and seek love ...
I do love the clothes on 'Mad Men' because my character has been so elegant and I would never have had access to these clothes. I think Janie Bryant is a costume designing genius. They'll call and tell me, 'It will only take an hour,' and I'm like, '...
I absolutely believe that, come November 2012, I'm going to be governor of New Jersey and not in any other office. But the fact of the matter is, if Gov. Romney, who's going to be our nominee, picked up the phone and called me to talk about this, I l...
I like to interpret 'Call me a River', as if I'm saying, 'Now you're telling me you love me after all that, and I'm telling you to shove off.' That's my interpretation. But I would never 'say' that because somebody else might interpret the song in an...
There are plenty of millionaires who would pay millions to hang a Van Gogh painting on the wall, but hardly one that would have ever had the crazy nut over for dinner. I feel like the big companies are like that with musicians. They'll say, 'We love ...
I listen to music mostly in the evening. I've come to love what is called world music, like the Zimbabwean Oliver Mtukudzi and the Colombian singer Marta Gomez. I also love the Irish folk singer Mary Black. Other favorites include Chet Baker, Eva Cas...
I had a blog where I tried to be transparent while giving away nothing. I tweeted and Facebooked badly. As a writer, your 'voice' is your calling card, yet my voice was becoming indistinguishable from billions of other voices.
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
A person's true identity can often be difficult to discern, even to themselves, causing one to question their character, their calling, their very existence. For most, time gives clarity, but for others, these questions remained unanswered for an ide...
Six months ago, I traveled to India to see firsthand what the prime minister of that country calls a national shame. It is the systematic, widespread, shocking elimination of India's baby girls. Some 50,000 female fetuses are aborted every month in I...
What offends me the most when I hear criticisms about this so-called Africa bias is how quick we are to focus on the words and propaganda of a few powerful, influential individuals, and to forget about the millions of anonymous people who suffer from...
Great art is always a way of concentrating, reinventing what is called fact, what we know of our existence- a reconcentration… tearing away the veils, the attitudes people acquire of their time and earlier time. Really good artists tear down those ...
The artist, and particularly the poet, is always an anarchist in the best sense of the word. He must heed only the call that arises within him from three strong voices: the voice of death, with all its foreboding, the voice of love and the voice of a...
It is more raw and unfettered and I'm more likely going into something you could call extreme cartooning. There's a lot of that in the course of 'Holy Terror.' There are interludes where there are pictures - cartoon pictures - of modern figures and t...
'Comic book' has come to mean a specific genre, not a story form, in people's minds. So someone will call 'Die Hard' a 'comic-book movie,' when it has nothing to do with comic books. I'd rather have comics be the vehicle by which stories are told.
...the passage of time, which transformed the volatile present into that finished, unalterable painting called the past, a canvas man always executed blindly, with erratic brushstrokes that only made sense when one stepped far enough away from it to ...
