Maurice Sendak is the daddy of them all when it comes to picture books - the words, the rhythm, the psychology, the design.
A lot of my characters are underdogs or sad or lonely, but I had a comfortable, golden sort of childhood.
Gorillas remind me of my father. He was a very big, physically strong man but also very sensitive.
The first thing I put down on paper is a storyboard, like a film director.
Having a memoir and a retrospective of your work running almost simultaneously when you're still alive does feel a bit posthumous.
Picture books are for everybody at any age, not books to be left behind as we grow older. The best ones leave a tantalising gap between the pictures and the words, a gap that is filled by the reader's imagination, adding so much to the excitement of reading a book.
