I Don't Believe In An Afterlife But

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.

Mothers And Children Are Human Beings, And They Will Sometimes Do The Wrong Thing.

I Never Spent Less Than Two Years On The Text Of One Of My Picture Books, Even Though Each Of Them Is Approximately 380 Words Long. Only When The Text Is Finished ... Do I Begin The Pictures.

An Illustrator In My Own Mind - And This Is Not A Truth Of Any Kind - Is Someone Who So Falls In Love With Writing That He Wishes He Had Written It, And The Closest He Can Get To Is Illustrating It. And The Next Thing You Learn, You Have To Find Something Unique In This Book, Which Perhaps Even The Author Was Not Entirely Aware Of. And That's What You Hold On To, And That's What You Add To The Pictures: A Whole Other Story That You Believe In, That You Think Is There.

In Plain Terms, A Child Is A Complicated Creature Who Can Drive You Crazy. There's A Cruelty To Childhood, There's An Anger.