I'm not sure it pays to do anything remotely public in Britain. It's such a spiteful society. People seem to enjoy making your life hard for the sake of it.
If I have any complaints about my youth... one is that many well-meaning adults lied to me. Not spiteful lies with malicious intent but lies designed to prevent emotional and psychological pain - lies told by the people who cared about me most: my parents, teachers, relatives.
I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.
Poetry criticism at its worst today is mean in spirit and spiteful in intent, as if determined to inflict the wound that will spur the artist to new heights if it does not cripple him or her.
The way the Establishment deals with people like me is to ignore them. When you become unignorable, they will try to smear you, and that's what I feared for a long time. Now I have somehow vaulted into this space where it's difficult for someone to smear me because it would look as though they were being vindictive and spiteful.
People is, I think, it's their nature - some people's nature, in a way, to be angry or jealous or just spiteful about somebody else's blessings.
It would be spiteful to put a Jellyfish in a trifle.
The British press have written some nasty and spiteful things about the way I look which used to affect me quite badly when it was new to me but luckily, I've learned to ignore the comments. why do they even care about how I look?
I have sometimes done cartoons that are hurtful to people - immature, spiteful stuff. Some are so self-indulgent, and some have just failed. I look back and sometimes cringe. But one regret as I get older is that I haven't been radical and wild enough.
You gotta deal with a lot of people, the naysayers... but I've always been the guy who kinda just smiles and laughs at it. I use it as constructive criticism to be honest. Whether they're intentionally trying to be kind of spiteful or not, it's constructive criticism because you can't say there's always truth to it but there's definitely something.
