On trying to explain your success

GOLDBERG:... to me, a guy is born with a certain point of view, then he tries to surround it with all the techniques he can find among other artists and things that he knows. I don't think that you deliberately strive to be a success as a cartoonist and get in a lot of papers, so much as you try to formulate your own point of view through the eyes of all the guys that you admired in the past. And later on you try to explain it. I read a thing in Time, I think it was, about |Charles M.] Schulz. Schulz tried to explain the essence of his success, and it was a complete bust because he didn't know.
KELLY: Charlie didn't know any better, he's young, you know. "Keep your bloody mouth shut" is the point.
GOLDBERG: Is that true about you?
KELLY: Sure, don't let anybody know what the hell you're doing. They're gonna come in that ring and knock the hell out of you.
GOLDBERG: So when you start analyzing these thing it's like reading an article in the Sunday Times. I hate that crap. And I don't know what they're talking about, so then I look at it and say, "Is that what they're talking about?" I don't think art is too much to talk about.
KELLY: No, the message is in the work. I can't help but agree so much with that. Rube is right. When you've said it the way you've said it, that's it. The things that influence you are the things you admire; ways of getting a problem done. You've got a piece of blank paper there, and you've got an idea about this elephant or whatever it is, and you try to make it as enchanting as you can. You try to get your idea across, which is the most important thing. I forget that sometimes. I go back into the drawing too often, and I don't get them as simplified as they should be for modern cartoon acceptability, so then I have to forget modern cartoon acceptability and do it the way I feel, like Rube says. I go back to being me. You know -- crabby old bastard.