I recently emailed, asking him, "Though they give me a college education, I yearn to know, in three simple steps, how I can learn to draw like you."

To my happy surprise, he indeed responded, saying:

1. Get a bitch of a mother who bans coloring books from your house and instills in you an urgent and futile need to please her.
2. Drink so hard that the only job you can hold down is knocking on doors asking people if they want a drawing of their house for fifty bucks.
3. When approaching forty years of age, come to your senses with a shock of realization at your failure in everything but an ability to draw things and desperately send portfolios to every magazine in the country.
"Love wakes men, once a lifetime each;
they lift their heavy lids, and look;
and, lo, what one sweet page can teach,
they read with joy, then shut the book.
And some give thanks, and some blaspheme, and most forget;
but either way, that and the child's unheeded dream is all the light of all their day."
- Sock Monkey