Openness is something any teacher strives to instill in his or her students.

Any teacher in the arts and sciences has to maintain a sense of childlikeness to be truly inventive.

It will always take a certain audacity to write or to make art of any kind.

To learn to ride a bicycle, as with the other great noble human inventions, is a hugely complex activity. Generally, it requires three things: the learner, the teacher and the bicycle, all in the same place at the same time, most often outside someplace.

Hand any four-year-old a fist full of crayons, and it is a very, very few who don't get busy with them, drawing, coloring, scribbling. I have not stopped scribbling.

Whether it's music, loss of something, loneliness or friendship - if that emotion is heightened in some way and painted to fit in between the covers of 32 pages, that can become a picture book.