Existential philosophy, poetry and art - just like sadness - were all unavoidable to a tender young man in the meat works.

As a cartoonist, I am not interested in defending the dominant, the powerful, the well-resourced and the well-armed because such groups are usually not in need of advocacy, moral support or sympathetic understanding; they have already organised sufficient publicity for themselves and prosecute their points of view with great efficiency.

So few humans seem to fully exist themselves that I wonder if all this endless speculation and haggling about God is really an exploration of a more interesting and embarrassing question about ourselves.

At the age of nine, I simultaneously fell in love with two Dutch sisters because they seemed so beautifully strange, and their clothes were mysterious and alluring - added to which, they could not speak a word of English. More than anything, I wanted to connect with them and embark on a vast journey of exploration.

You hear the word 'cancer,' and you think it is a death sentence. In fact, the shock is the biggest thing about a diagnosis of cancer.

L. Ram Saran Das was sentenced to death in 1915, and the sentence was later commuted to life transportation. Today myself, sitting in the condemned cell, I can let the readers know as authoritatively that the life-imprisonment is comparatively a far harder lot than that of death.

Looking good and feeling like death is a difficult combination for people to understand.

The only thing I have never known is true intimacy with a man. I absolutely wanted to discover that before dying.