I was sickly as a child and gravitated to books and drawing. During my early teen years, I spent hundreds of hours at my window, sketching neighborhood children at play. I sketched and listened, and those notebooks became the fertile field of my work later on. There is not a book I have written or a picture I have drawn that does not, in some way, owe them its existence.

I have this idiot name tag which says 'controversial.'

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?

Kids books Grownup books That's just marketing. Books are books.

I'd like to believe an accumulation of experience has made me a sort of a grown-up person, so I can have judgment and taste and whatever.

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

I know there are supposedly happy people in this world. I never believed it, but I take it for granted. God knows, they're all on television.