A lot of my characters are underdogs or sad or lonely, but I had a comfortable, golden sort of childhood.

As a boy, I devoured comics but never saw what we now describe as a picture book.

Maurice Sendak is the daddy of them all when it comes to picture books - the words, the rhythm, the psychology, the design.

A lot of my characters are underdogs or sad or lonely, but I had a comfortable, golden sort of childhood.

The first things I remember drawing were battles - big sheets of paper covered in terrible scenes of carnage - though when you looked closely there were little jokes and speech bubbles and odd things going on in the background.

Picture books are for everybody at any age, not books to be left behind as we grow older.

You can never have 'equality' between two things that are not equal by definition. And so, for example, you can have equality among 'people', but not between 'men' and 'women'.