My earliest recollections are of the teeming East Side where I was born. This Hester Street and its surrounding streets were the most densely populated of any city on Earth; and looking back at it, I realize what I owe to its unique and crowded humanity.

As a child, I had a serious illness that lasted for two years or more. I have vague recollections of this illness and of my being carried about a great deal. I was known as the 'sick one.' Whether this illness gave me a twist away from ordinary paths, I don't know; but it is possible.

My parents did not discourage me but could not understand how I could make a living by art. Their idea of an artist was a person who was condemned to starvation.

The artist who imagines that he puts his best into a portrait in order to produce something good, which will be a pleasure to the sitter and to himself, will have some bitter experiences.

As children, we all hold on to the myth of omnipotence. Comics are successful because kids identify with superheroes. They'll read a book or watch a TV programme and say, 'I'm that guy.' And that guy is always the one in control.

When you have a Jewish mother who has a very strong Jewish family, it's very ethnic in its practices. Eating brisket, the food and the family and the interconnectedness for better or worse.

Mr. Bean is essentially a child trapped in the body of a man. All cultures identify with children in a similar way, so he has this bizarre global outreach.

I was born during the war, on October 20, 1942, as the second of five children. My father, Rolf Volhard, was an architect.