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.