A Book Is Really Like A Lover.

Art Has Always Been My Salvation. And My Gods Are Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Mozart. I Believe In Them With All My Heart. And When Mozart Is Playing In My Room, I Am In Conjunction With Something I Can’t Explain — I Don’t Need To. I Know That If There’s A Purpose For Life, It Was For Me To Hear Mozart. Or If I Walk In The Woods And I See An Animal, The Purpose Of My Life Was To See That Animal. I Can Recollect It, I Can Notice It. I’m Here To Take Note Of. And That Is Beyond My Ego, Beyond Anything That Belongs To Me, An Observer, An Observer.

You Cannot Write For Children They're Much Too Complicated. You Can Only Write Books That Are Of Interest To Them.

And It's One Of The Sexiest Things You Will Ever Read Of How Slow You Should Take The Peach. Don't Rush It.

In Another Project I Worked On Just A Few Years Ago, A Staging Of Peter And The Wolf, Which I Translated Into Yiddish And Sang On A Stage In New York City. Thank God Very Few People Knew I Was Doing It! But The Kids In The Audience Loved It - Even Though It Was All In Yiddish.

Then One Day My Sister Abandoned Me At The 1939 World's Fair, And That Incident Is The Essence Of In The Night Kitchen. I Was Standing There With Hundreds Of Other People Waving Back At The Little Midgets Dressed Like Bakers When I Turned Around And My Sister Was Gone! The Next Thing I Know I'm Screaming And Crying And Policemen Are Taking Me To A Big Place With Tons Of Kids Who Had All Been Abandoned Like Me. At Least I Was Old Enough To Give Them A Name And An Address.