When you hide another story in a story, that’s the story I am telling the children.

In plain terms, a child is a complicated creature who can drive you crazy. There's a cruelty to childhood, there's an anger.

I believe there is no part of our lives, our adult as well as child life, when we're not fantasizing, but we prefer to relegate fantasy to children, as though it were some tomfoolery only fit for the immature minds of the young. Children do live in fantasy and reality; they move back and forth very easily in a way we no longer remember how to do.

Children are tough, though we tend to think of them as fragile. They have to be tough. Childhood is not easy. We sentimentalize children, but they know what's real and what's not. They understand metaphor and symbol. If children are different from us, they are more spontaneous. Grown-up lives have become overlaid with dross.

I've always loved pigs: the shape of them, the look of them, and the fact that they are so intelligent.

Mothers and children are human beings, and they will sometimes do the wrong thing.

It is such an abundance of idiocy that you lose courage. That you lose hope. I don't want to lose hope. I get through every day. I'm pretty good. I work. I sleep. I sing. I walk.