When I was a kid, I never saw a puppet show. I never played with puppets or had any interest in them.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye.

All of a sudden you realise that you are the person who has control of your life.

Yeah, we pretty much had a form and a shape by that time - a style - and I think one of the advantages of not having any relationship to any other puppeteer was that it gave me a reason to put those together myself for the needs of television.

I do remember doing shows strictly in black and white, too, so you're right.

Yeah, well when I first started working, it was $5 a show; it was probably a little higher by the time I got to my own show, but I remember that they put me under contract at $100 a week, which to me was really an astronomical price.

Certainly I've lived my whole life through my imagination. But the world of imagination is there for all of us--a sense of play, of pretending, of wonder. It's there with us as we live.