I adored Mickey Mouse when I was a child. He was the emblem of happiness and funniness.

Certainly we want to protect our children from new and painful experiences that are beyond their emotional comprehension and that intensify anxiety; and to a point we can prevent premature exposure to such experiences.

There's a mystery there, a clue, a nut, a bolt, and if I put it together, I find me.

There are certain pieces of music that are always attached to certain books.

Sendak is in search of what he calls a "yummy death". William Blake set the standard, jumping up from his death bed at the last minute to start singing. "A happy death," says Sendak. "It can be done." He lifts his eyebrows to two peaks. "If you're William Blake and totally crazy.

In another project I worked on just a few years ago, a staging of Peter and the Wolf, which I translated into Yiddish and sang on a stage in New York City. Thank God very few people knew I was doing it! But the kids in the audience loved it - even though it was all in Yiddish.

My father could be very witty, even if the humor was always on the darker side of irony.