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I see my albums as working diaries, as living scrapbooks of me and my life.

Teachers believe they have a gift for giving; it drives them with the same irrepressible drive that drives others to create a work of art or a market or a building.

Making books is a very specific kind of activity. It's not really a collection of your best pictures - although it is - but it's also a way of presenting your work so that it's not repetitive, so that it flows, and so that it makes sense in a book.

The illustrations in picture books are the first paintings most children see, and because of that, they are incredibly important. What we see and share at that age stays with us for life.

I love making books for children. Big kids, little kids, old kids and new.

School librarians play such an enormous role in bringing children to books they are going to enjoy. It's a magic alchemy when that works.

I would begin by collecting lithographs and etchings. It's a way of coming in and benefiting from real quality art. Even younger artists make wonderful prints. Prints can become very valuable. That's how I began collecting.

I'll always write picture books - it's just what I do. I'd even do it if I wasn't being paid.

I normally keep a series of draft in a catalogue type of book in which I scribble, sketch and draw ideas.

It's really an interesting problem, trying to earn a living and serve art and serve kids. What I try to create are these visual layers so that readers feel the possibility exists that there might be something in the book they never saw before.