I look for poetry in English because it's the only language I read.

There's not too much difference between writing a picture book and writing a collection of a hundred poems or so, except that the bigger books take a lot longer to do.

I've been influenced by poets as diverse as Dylan Thomas, Lewis Carroll, and Edgar Allan Poe.

Children seem naturally drawn to poetry - it's some combination of the rhyme, rhythm, and the words themselves.

I'm working now on a collection of Shakespearean sonnets, about 100 of them, that I may publish if anyone's interested. My take on life is a little different from the bard's.

Otherwise I don't read much adult poetry at all, because I'm not smart enough and mostly I don't get it.

I invented animals and birds - I had about two dozen. After working on them for six months, I sat down and just for fun wrote two dozen poems to accompany the drawings. It was for no one to every see, but a friend sent me in to an editor.