I want to be free again. I want to be free like when I was a kid, working with my brother and making toy airplanes and a whole model of the World’s Fair in 1939 out of wax.
Children are the best living audience in the world because they are so thoroughly honest.
I want to see me to the end working, living for myself. Ripeness is all.
It’s only adults who read the top layers most of the time. I think children read the internal meanings of everything.
As a child, I felt that books were holy objects, to be caressed, rapturously sniffed, and devotedly provided for. I gave my life to them. I still do. I continue to do what I did as a child; dream of books, make books and collect books.
Life has only gotten better personally for me as I’ve gotten older. I mean, being young was such a gross waste of time. I was just such a miserable, miserable person.
I’ve always loved pigs: the shape of them, the look of them, and the fact that they are so intelligent.
Kids tell you what they think, not what they think they should think.
That’s what art is. You don’t make up stories. You live your life.
I don’t write for children. I write, and somebody says, ‘That’s for children.’
I’m not jaded. I never have been jaded. I’ve always been surprised at my success. I’ve always enjoyed it.
Mothers and children are human beings, and they will sometimes do the wrong thing.
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?
I’m getting old. And I’m disappointed in everything just the way old people traditionally, boringly are. That bothers me because is it too traditional? Am I not fighting hard enough? I don’t feel the fight. I don’t feel it.
I often went to bed without supper cause I hated my mother’s cooking. So, to go to bed without supper was not a torture to me. If she was gonna hurt me, she’d make me eat.
I don’t believe in things literally for children. That’s a reduction.
It is such an abundance of idiocy that you lose courage. That you lose hope. I don’t want to lose hope. I get through every day. I’m pretty good. I work. I sleep. I sing. I walk.
Why is my needle stuck in childhood? I don’t know why. I guess it’s because that’s where my heart is.
The fan mail I get from kids are asking me questions which they do not ask their mothers and fathers. Because if they had, why write to me, a perfect stranger?
All I wanted was to be straight so my parents could be happy. They never, never, never knew.