M dad was a boxer, so he had this fierce, physical presence.

Picture books are for everybody at any age, not books to be left behind as we grow older.

A lot of my characters are underdogs or sad or lonely, but I had a comfortable, golden sort of childhood.

You can never have 'equality' between two things that are not equal by definition. And so, for example, you can have equality among 'people', but not between 'men' and 'women'.

Maurice Sendak is the daddy of them all when it comes to picture books - the words, the rhythm, the psychology, the design.

As a boy, I devoured comics but never saw what we now describe as a picture book.

Never forget that children are at the heart of everything we do. Respect them, listen to them, talk to them as equals, and care about them.

Stories come to me in mysterious ways, more like dreams than reasoned creations.

I'm impressed by the way some illustrators develop their images on computers, but it's too late for me to start, and I'm still in love with paper and paint and pencils.

After art college, I got a job as a medical illustrator, and I was pretty good. I had to imagine what was going on in the operations because the photographs just showed a mess.

When I was a boy, I was a worrier, and so was my son, Joe. I used to tell him that worrying meant he had an imagination and that one day he'd be pleased.

None are so blind as those who will not see.

To me playing third base and left field and moving all over the place, it doesn't bother me because I still have to grab that bat and hit no matter where I play.

Exaggeration is the cheapest form of humor.

The landscape for business isn’t changing because of social media, it’s changing because consumer expectations are evolving.

After a long life I have come to the conclusion that when all the Establishment is united it is always wrong.

The dangers of life are infinite, and among them is safety.

We spend our lives trying to unlock the mystery of the universe, but there was a Turkish prisoner, Bahá’u’lláh, in Akka, Palestine who had the Key.

In the partnership between ourselves and the horse there must be one ruling spirit, and that one must be the rider.

Mickey is a secret journal chained closed with a padlock, slammed inside a vault and dropped into the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

They ought to be gentle to their friends and dangerous to their enemies.