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Well, the first library I encountered was this
rural library
out in the country in Louisiana.
and it was kind of almost hysterically picturesque
in that it was a log cabin and it had
a wood floor and no air conditioning.
I'm not even sure it had electricity, come to think of it.
It was right up against a bayou, there were alligators
that we had to be wary of.
And that's where I first saw "Where the Wild Things Are," and it changed my life.
When we travel
we've gone to a number of libraries, in like Paris
bibliotec whatever,
things like that.
Went to a library in Praque,
about a month ago, that was amazing.
Ancient books, all hand-illuminated
by monks.
You know, I'm just a sucker for books, so I'm going to go where there are piles of them.
That's where libraries usually
fit the bill. [Do libraries play an important role in the creative process?]
Well, I keep writing books that have libraries in them,
so I suppose they do. It's...
I'm still working on...
"The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore"
is all about a librarian, a man who gives his life to books
and they return the favor, actually. And then another book I'm working on after
that is [about] a man who has this amazing personal library that
follows him everywhere.
[On budget cuts] Library budget cuts,
when I hear about that kind of stuff, I turn into black and white and become a villager from
Transylvania bearing a torch.
I want to hunt down the monsters that are doing that.
[On censorship] OK, so like a book's going to jump out
and strangle you or kill you, or ruin your kid's morality or something.
Give me a break.
You've got to give kids and people just a little more credit
to think that they should be able to read something on their own and draw their own conclusion.
It's not like the book sears its words into your
syntax, or whatever, your ganglions, and you're suddenly changed.
You have
an open mind.
If there are ideas in a book
that appeal to your intellect or your emotions, or whatever, you should be able to experience
that one way or the other.If you're going to try to ban books, then you're trying to ban thought,
you're trying to ban emotion, you're trying to ban things that make the country what it's supposed to be, which is
open for discussion.
So it drives me crazy when I hear about...
like especially "Huck Finn," that just drives me nuts.
The best book... the best American book ever written. The best book about race ever written,
and you ban it because of a word that is offensive
but it is the very use of that word that makes it,
that gives it its power, and the renouncing of that word in the course
of the text in that book
is what makes it great. So you know, if you go you can't read this book because it has this one
word in it,
then you're missing the whole point of the book
and you're missing why the books' been around for so long. So that's just dumb.
[On his latest projects] I'm working on... I'm thinking of books as a sort of app
and combining them...
with what you can do with an iPad or any of those pads, and it's very exciting and I
think it's going to
augment what a book can be. It isn't going to destroy a book.
It's just going to be another venue,
another method of telling a story.
So I'm playing around with that whole lot.
My first app came out two weeks ago,
and it's based on
a book 'to be' called "The Fantastic
Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore."
And then I'm working on my Guardians of Childhood series, which is
ten picture books, and
how many novels, six novels
that chronicle the
origins, formations and how do their jobs of the icons of childhood, The Man
in the Moon, Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy,
Easter Bunny, Jack Frost, Mother Goose and eventually probably like...
the Sand Man's in there...
Father Time...
a couple of those other folks, and I'm working on movies of that and a movie of another book
called "The Leaf Men,"
that's a book I did a few years ago.