I remember how much - when I was a small boy I was taken to see a version of 'Peter Pan.' I detested it. I mean, the sentimental idea that anybody would want to remain a boy.

And the wild things roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws.

If I have an unusual gift, it's not that I draw particularly better than other people - I've never fooled myself about that. Rather it's that I remember things other people don't recall: the sounds and feelings and images - the emotional quality - of particular moments in childhood. Happily an essential part of myself - my dreaming life - still lives in the light of childhood.

Then one day my sister abandoned me at the 1939 World's Fair, and that incident is the essence of In the Night Kitchen. I was standing there with hundreds of other people waving back at the little midgets dressed like bakers when I turned around and my sister was gone! The next thing I know I'm screaming and crying and policemen are taking me to a big place with tons of kids who had all been abandoned like me. At least I was old enough to give them a name and an address.

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.

I had been reading a fabulous book [The Man Verdi, by Frank Walker] about [Giuseppe] Verdi, whom I adore.

I’m not Hans Christian Andersen. Nobody’s gonna make a statue in the park with a lot of scrambling kids climbing up me. I won’t have it, okay?