Do parents sit down and tell their kids everything? I don’t know. I don’t know. I’ve convinced myself – I hope I’m right – that children despair of you if you don’t tell them the truth.
If children are different from us, they are more spontaneous. Grown-up lives have become overlaid with dross.
I have to accept my role. I will never kill myself like Vincent Van Gogh. Nor will I paint beautiful water lilies like Monet. I can’t do that. I’m in the idiot role of being a kiddie book person.
There are certain pieces of music that are always attached to certain books.
I know that if there’s a purpose for life, it was for me to hear Mozart.
You don’t want to do something that’s all terrifying.
Venturing back further, learning is so slow. Accomplishment is so slow. Experiencing and evaluating your experience is so slow.
There’s something in this country that is so opposed to understanding the complexity of children.
Parents shouldn’t assume children are made out of sugar candy and will break and collapse instantly. Kids don’t. We do.
My life in Brooklyn was in constant danger because of my bad health.
My father could be very witty, even if the humor was always on the darker side of irony.
My father belonged to a Jewish social club.
I had a brother who was my savior, made my childhood bearable.
It’s no fun being lonely.
One of the beauties of being an artist is that you can create a whole new world, with circumstances that are better in your invented world than they are in the real world.
I don’t believe in an afterlife but I still fully expect to see my brother again.
That always seemed to be the most critical test that a child was confronted with – loss of parents, loss of direction, loss of love. Can you live without a mother and a father?
Certainly we want to protect our children from new and painful experiences that are beyond their emotional comprehension and that intensify anxiety; and to a point we can prevent premature exposure to such experiences.
I really don’t like the city anymore. You get pushed and harassed and people grope you. It’s too tumultuous. It’s too crazy.
I did not know how to paint a mural. I did not know how to prepare the surface. There was nobody from the Renaissance around who could advise me, and I did the best I could.