Emotion combined with an artist’s discipline is the rarest thing in the world.
That is the creative artist – a penalty of the creative artist – wanting to make order out of chaos.
The creative artist is the one wanting to make order out of chaos. The rest of us just accept disorder -if we even recognize it- and get a bang out of our five beautiful senses, if we’re lucky.
The grave’s a fine and quiet place but none I think do finish their books from there.
I never want to forget that if Lewis Carroll had asked me whether or not he should bother writing about a little girl named Alice who fell asleep and dreamed that she had a lot of adventures down a rabbit hole, it would not have sounded awfully tempting to any editor.
Most books are written from the outside in, but “Where the Wild Things Are” comes from the inside out. I think Maurice’s book is the first picture book to recognize the fact that children have powerful emotions: anger and love and hate. And only after all that passion, the wanting to be ’where someone loved him best of all.