Brown Bear, Brown Bear was kind of my first important book.
We have eyes, and we’re looking at stuff all the time, all day long. And I just think that whatever our eyes touch should be beautiful, tasteful, appealing, and important.
In the light of the moon a little egg lay on a leaf.
On Saturday, he ate through one piece of chocolate cake, one ice-cream cone, one pickle, one slice of Swiss cheese, one slice of salami, one lollipop, one piece of cherry pie, one sausage, one cupcake, and one slice of watermelon That night he had a stomach ache.
Let’s put it this way: if you are a novelist, I think you start out with a 20 word idea, and you work at it and you wind up with a 200,000 word novel. We, picture-book people, or at least I, start out with 200,000 words and I reduce it to 20.
One Sunday morning the warm sun came up and – pop! – out of the egg came a tiny and very hungry caterpillar.
They are deceptively simple. I admit that. But for me, all my life I try to simplify things. As a child in school, things were very hard for me to understand often, and I developed a knack, I think. I developed a process to simplify things so I would understand them.
Simplify, slow down, be kind. And don’t forget to have art in your life – music, paintings, theater, dance, and sunsets.
The hardest part is developing the idea, and that can take years.
Papa, please get the moon for me.
You know, now it’s sinking in. It’s taken me a long time to realize – and it is sinking in – how important this book is. And I have a certain distance now. I’ve done it such a long time ago.
One day I think it’s the greatest idea ever that I’m working on. The next day I think it’s the worst that I’ve ever worked on – and I swing between that a lot. Some days I’m very happy with what I’m doing, and the next day I am desperate – it’s not working out!