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I read a whole lot as a child, and, of course, I still read children's books.

I always knew that I wanted to live with books, even as a child, because we traveled a lot. Home was the book to which I came back every evening.

Storybooks were always a big part of my imagination, and my childhood and adolescence.

I started writing books for children because I could illustrate them myself and because, in my innocence, I thought they'd be easier.

I was kind of an outsider growing up, and I preferred reading to being with other kids. When I was about seven, I started to write my own books. I never thought of myself as wanting to be a writer - I just was one.

Then one day I thought it would be wonderful to make a whole book, to make my text and my drawings together, and that's how I started doing children's books.

I came from a family of incredible storytellers, but I didn't start writing children's books until I was 41 years old.

I did have a child, and I was reading a lot of picture books to her, but at the same time writing a children's book was something that I'd been wanting to do for many years, pretty much since the start of my career.

For 10 or 11 years, I had my kids, I wrote four or five books, and I was working all the damn time.

I wrote my first books when I was single and then I got married and then had a kid and there were different things happening in my life.