I Don't Want To Lose Hope.

I Was Sickly As A Child And Gravitated To Books And Drawing. During My Early Teen Years, I Spent Hundreds Of Hours At My Window, Sketching Neighborhood Children At Play. I Sketched And Listened, And Those Notebooks Became The Fertile Field Of My Work Later On. There Is Not A Book I Have Written Or A Picture I Have Drawn That Does Not, In Some Way, Owe Them Its Existence.

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.

My Sister Had Her Own Room. She Also Had Innumerable Boyfriends. I Had A Yo-yo Collection That Was Beyond Belief, And The Reason I Had It Was Mostly That I Would Stand In The Doorway Of The Living Room Watching Her And Her Boyfriend. Finally She Caught On How To Get This Kid Out Of The Way. Give Him A Yo-yo!

A Book Is Really Like A Lover. It Arranges Itself In Your Life In A Way That Is Beautiful.

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.