■ All the Peanuts characters felt like real people to me as a kid, almost like my friends. Simply opening one of those old decaying Peanuts paperbacks in my grandparents’ basement felt like going to someone’s house to play. I felt so sorry for Charlie Brown that I made him a valentine, even though I knew he was just a drawing. That Charles Schulz could affect me so deeply with his simple little doodles remains an astonishing artistic summit against which I’m always comparing myself.

■ No matter what I draw, somehow it always comes out looking slightly more considered and composed than the thing itself, which maybe is the first step towards what we think of as “beauty” in art. Our brains naturally condense experience into a more intense or pleasing version. Just trying to see something clearly, like the way we used to lay around in the grass as kids and look at clover and bugs and worms, is, I think, where it all starts.

■ When you’re young, art is a sort of pressure valve, an oasis of freedom. The problems start when the art starts paying for food and shelter, since you then risk freezing up and ceasing to try new things — or, even worse, worrying about what others think.

■ I don’t plan my stories except to take random notes as I think of things while driving, mowing, brushing my teeth, et cetera — most of which don’t go into the books. The notes are simply a trick to get me down to work. I found early on that if I wrote a script, the pictures ended up just being illustrations, not an irreplaceable part of the story itself, with the result dead on arrival. But the ideas that occurred to me as I drew — pictures opening up into memories and experiences I’d forgotten about — produced much better, more believable, and more complicated and intertwined stories. I learned to trust my unconscious. It’s very important for the artist to find the structure of a story rather than to impose one.

■ I am very dubious of everything I do and profoundly uncertain of its value. I used to hope that as I got older this uncertainty would temper and I’d develop some sort of self-confidence, but that never happened. It rankles me that self-confidence is somehow seen as a positive trait; I don’t think it serves anyone, and most self-confident people I’ve met are either mildly insane or, worse, jerks, and use it as a means of domination, which is just plain repellent.

■ It’s important to treat your child’s opinions, efforts, and thoughts as valuable and interesting, because they are. My daughter, Clara, provided a virtual fire hose of insights and epiphanies in her elementary and middle school years: “Dad, everyone’s always talking about time machines, but we all have one. It’s called your mind!” Kids want to be heard, seen, and believed, which my mother and my grandmother both did, generously, for me.

■ One of the best art teachers I ever had at the University of Texas at Austin, Richard Jordan, told our painting class one day that if somebody — friend, critic, whoever — said that they didn’t like something you’d done, try to separate the hurt of their criticism from the simple fact that they noticed something you did and, especially, that it got to them.