I wrote as a kid, but I never wanted to be a writer, particularly. I had been drawing and painting for years and loved that.
I had a lot of really emo stories as a kid. I wrote a lot of fan fiction.
I started drawing in first grade. Because the kid next to me was drawing, and I remember thinking: I want to be able to do that!
Today, kids are much more aware of what fashion means, but when I was growing up, it was popular, but not as popular as today. Like any kid, I was fascinated by drawing. But when some of the kids let go, I kept drawing and drawing.
'Creeping Death' - that was a special song for me as a kid, because that was the one that every single Jewish kid thought, 'Oh, Metallica wrote a song for us. He wrote it about the exodus of the Jews from Egypt under slavery.'
I am trying to represent design through drawing. I have always drawn things to a high degree of detail. That is not an ideological position I hold on drawing but is rather an expression of my desire to design and by extension to build. This has often been mistaken as a fetish I have for drawing: of drawing for drawing’s sake, for the love of drawing. Never. Never. Yes, I love making a beautiful, well-crafted drawing, but I love it only because of the amount of information a precise drawing provides
I think there were some programs but in those days art programs were kind of basic. You would do drawing and simple collage type work. But at home I was beginning to get interested in doing my own thing as well. I'm not sure what inspired this, but I became very interested in decorating things.
Every song I ever wrote, I wrote to be heard. So, if I was given a choice that 50 years from now I could either have a dollar or knowing that some kid was listening to my song, I'd go with the kid listening to my song.
I got into underground comics fairly early on and kind of wandered away from the superhero stuff, but I was an art student and I was drawing a lot as a kid.
I remember when I was a kid rugby players were some big guys that drunk a lot of beer but now they have proper training programs and diets and all that. And the pioneers of all that is bodybuilding.
When I was still in prep school - 14, 15 - I started keeping notebooks, journals. I started writing, almost like landscape drawing or life drawing. I never kept a diary, I never wrote about my day and what happened to me, but I described things.
But some people will say you just did these programs. Well, yes, the programs are important and I'm proud of the programs, but mostly I'm proud of the way the San Francisco Symphony plays these programs.
I used to want to be a computer programmer when I was younger. We got an Apple II Plus when I was, like, 11 and I wrote programs and BASIC on that, like I think a lot of people did, but I have no idea how to program in the current languages at all.
I'm a regular person. I'm a regular guy. As a kid, I played games. As a kid, I liked poetry. As a kid, I liked drawing. And I never felt the need to stop doing anything. I never lost interest in them.
In the immediate aftermath of the separation I just wrote and wrote and wrote. And wrote and wrote and wrote. Thank God I had that as an outlet.
All I liked to do when I was a kid was draw. My childhood was like my adult life: drawing pictures with my brother, putting the comics up on the glass window, and tracing the characters onto tracing paper or drawing paper and then coloring them. That and making things was all we ever did.