I want to write something so simple, so short and so silly... and I want it to be for my brother.

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

William Blake really is important, my cornerstone. Nobody ever told me before he did that childhood was such a damned serious business.

I mean, being a child was being a child, was being a creature without power, without pocket money, without escape routes of any kind. So I didn't want to be a child.

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.

Thank God that Bumble-Ardy's parents are dead so we don't have to wonder what they did to him. We only know that they were famous, and famous people have unhappy children for the most part. They don't have the time to take care of them. So he's a troubled pig-boy, a kid you've got to watch.

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?