I invented animals and birds - I had about two dozen. After working on them for six months, I sat down and just for fun wrote two dozen poems to accompany the drawings. It was for no one to every see, but a friend sent me in to an editor.

After I'd produced about two dozen pen and ink drawings, one evening I decided that they needed poems to accompany them. I still have no idea where that notion came from, but it took me about two hours to produce verses for these creatures.

I keep a guitar around while writing and will improvise music. I do this for several reasons, such as that it's fun, and sometimes it helps me with the meter.

Poetry seems to sink into us the way prose doesn't. I can still quote verses I learned when I was very young, but I have trouble remembering one line of a novel I just finished reading.

I accept challenges, I have always done that in writing.

My reading is extremely eclectic. Lately I've been teaching myself computer graphics, so I'm reading a lot about that. I read books of trivia, of facts.

There's not too much difference between writing a picture book and writing a collection of a hundred poems or so, except that the bigger books take a lot longer to do.

We all need ways to express ourselves, and poetry is one of mine.

Frankly, writing poetry for children is plain old fun, and I consider myself blessed to have such a delightful career.

Then I decided to draw from and on my own imagination, and everything came out perfect.

Writing gives me the opportunity to explore ideas, play with language, solve problems, use my imagination, and draw on my own childhood.

When I began writing, I didn't read any other children's poets... I didn't want to be influenced until I'd found my own voice. Now I read them all.

I've been influenced by poets as diverse as Dylan Thomas, Lewis Carroll, and Edgar Allan Poe.

I invented animals and birds - I had about two dozen. After working on them for six months, I sat down and just for fun wrote two dozen poems to accompany the drawings. It was for no one to every see, but a friend sent me in to an editor.

I look for poetry in English because it's the only language I read.

I would go to sketch groups and draw. I really enjoyed the subject matter, but I wasn't good at it.

Children seem naturally drawn to poetry - it's some combination of the rhyme, rhythm, and the words themselves.

I'm usually working on eight or 10 things at once.

I'm working now on a collection of Shakespearean sonnets, about 100 of them, that I may publish if anyone's interested. My take on life is a little different from the bard's.

I write the poems first, with only a few exceptions for odd reasons, where I'm given the illustration first.

Otherwise I don't read much adult poetry at all, because I'm not smart enough and mostly I don't get it.

My wife used to tell me one of my best qualities was that my feet don't smell, but I remember my brother's did when we were kids.

I'm mostly influenced by life, what's around me, and my own childhood.

I'm never bored.

I always knew would be some sort of artist, but didn't know what.

In masks and gown we haunt the street and knock on doors for trick or treat tonight we are the king and queen for oh tonight its Halloween

Man has done a lot to make himself dangerous and animals get the worst of all of it. But then, man too is an animal.

Biology will relate every human gene to the genes of other animals and bacteria, to this great chain of being.

When I see professional clowns, mimes, or people who makes ballon animals, I think of their relatives and how disappointed they must be.

Animals often strike us as passionate machines.

My object will be, first, to show by what connections the history of the fossil bones of land animals is linked to the theory of the earth and why they have a particular importance in this respect.

Hence the same instant which killed the animals froze the country where they lived. This event was sudden, instantaneous, without any gradual development.

Towns are suffering from all these things, we should unite until we are all satisfied, man cannot be killing each other as if we were animals, as if we had no culture; that is a lack of culture.

Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions; they pass no criticisms.

The only way to save a rhinoceros is to save the environment in which it lives, because there's a mutual dependency between it and millions of other species of both animals and plants.

I've always been fascinated by the way that children and animals suffer stoically in a way that I don't think adults do.

Ever occur to you why some of us can be this much concerned with animals suffering? Because government is not. Why not? Animals don't vote.

Animals are reliable, many full of love, true in their affections, predictable in their actions, grateful and loyal. Difficult standards for people to live up to.

When we seed millions of acres of land with these plants, what happens to foraging birds, to insects, to microbes, to the other animals, when they come in contact and digest plants that are producing materials ranging from plastics to vaccines to pharmaceutical products?

It's been my dream to have four babies by 30. I look after animals, so I'd have a lot to give my kids.

Yes, I've kissed a lot of guys. I like to kiss, but that's it. I don't go home with anyone. I sleep with my animals, like my baby monkey, Brigitte Bardot.

The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals.

The tabloids are like animals, with their own behavioural patterns. There's no point in complaining about them, any more than complaining that lions might eat you.

Early experiences convinced me that animals can and do have quite distinct personalities.

Without civilization, we would not turn into animals, but vegetables.

God sleeps in the minerals, awakens in plants, walks in animals, and thinks in man.

History is a people's memory, and without a memory, man is demoted to the lower animals.

Although I agree that wild horses are a symbol of the American West, I also believe that it is the responsibility of Congress to ensure that these animals are managed, protected, and controlled in an effective manner.

Man, of all the animals, is probably the only one to regard himself as a great delicacy.