COVID19 has created deep uncertainty in nearly almost all aspects of daily life.. It is possible that one can even benefit from interacting and brainstorming with others over the phone, but awesome creative work can be achieved by shutting out the outside world.

We must use time creatively.

Our creative potential has many aspects, but undoubtedly the most important one is to make good use of ourselves and what we are here and now, at each successive moment.

Creativity is an interesting thing…You can sit back, have a glass of wine, watch some television…and get a terrific idea of what you want to do…The great thing about being at home is that as soon as you get an idea you can put a mike at the piano and record it. That way you don’t lose the vibes, and you don’t have to worry about finishing before the studio’s next booking arrives…”

It’s good to have space to think. It’s in the empty moments when you’re the most creative.

It always seemed to me that if you could get a laugh out of something, that was good, and if you could make life more colorful than it actually was, that was good. So, any artist of individual who worked in those two directions was doing something good.

Creative things happen to creative people, especially when they let themselves go to the Zen of the moment, when they don’t allow themselves to be paralyzed either by overthinking or by laziness.

I’m doing a lot of worrying about humanity destroying itself these days. I think it is an important role of a political cartoonist. I think sometimes it’s probably more acute than others. It’s something that’s hard to deal with sometimes. Right now I find that these aren’t really funny times. There are ludicrous characters and you can make fun of Trump and these ridiculous nominees, but at the same time I don’t want to normalize him. I find myself not even wanting to draw him. I mean, I do and I will, but I don’t want to treat him like any other President. I’ve been struggling with that. How to be humorous at a time when things are just very serious. I guess what I wind up doing is somewhat darker humor, darker cartoons, and more informative cartoons that say, this is what’s happening, can you believe it? With the Bush administration things were terrible and there were definitely some dark times, but I felt like you could make fun of Bush for being a buffoon and the implications just weren’t quite as grave. It’s a different time now.

Daydreaming is also important time for artists.

COVID-19 is taking so much from us. But it’s also giving us something special – the opportunity to come together as one humanity – to work together, to learn together, to grow together.

I had more flow as a designer. I could just drop down into the zone and stay there for hours. With cartooning, I'm constantly coming up for air, procrastinating, looking for reasons not to be doing it. I spend all day granting myself special dispensation, with 'creative process' as my cover story. Carpenters and deli countermen can't do that, so I think they may feel better about themselves at the end of the day.

Creative people, as I see them, are distinguished by the fact that they can live with anxiety, even though a high price may be paid in terms of insecurity, sensitivity, and defenselessness for the gift of the “divine madness,” to borrow the term used by the classical Greeks. They do not run away from non-being, but by encountering and wrestling with it, force it to produce being. They knock on silence for an answering music; they pursue meaninglessness until they can force it to mean.

I am already seeing the crisis reformatting into some artistic statements, there will be plays, maybe films. Definitely theatrical performances. As strange as it sounds, I think that these difficult times have changed arts people, especially in theater and film, who were never fond of social subjects and always tried to keep their distance. And now they jumped right into it because of this difficult situation. And I think there will be only more of that.

The less scheduled you are, the more creative you’re going to be.