After art college, I got a job as a medical illustrator, and I was pretty good. I had to imagine what was going on in the operations because the photographs just showed a mess.
The first things I remember drawing were battles - big sheets of paper covered in terrible scenes of carnage - though when you looked closely, there were little jokes and speech bubbles and odd things going on in the background.
I had just been promoted to the first rugby team. It was a perfect, wonderful coming of age. My brother was already in the team, and my father had come to watch us. We went home, and my father died in front of me. Horribly, in about half an hour. He had a heart attack.
From 17 to 21, I was obsessed by sport and art. In art, I loved the pre-Raphaelites and Rembrandt first. Then I discovered Salvador Dali, and it was like finding something I already knew.
As a boy, I devoured comics but never saw what we now describe as a picture book.
Worrying can be a kind of caring, and as such is a healthy part of a balanced emotional life.
Pictures are as evocative to me as smells.
As a child, I'd always liked cowboys and Indians stories where there were two layers - gruesome in the foreground but funny in the background.
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.
Picture books are being marginalised. I get the feeling children are being pushed away from picture books earlier and earlier and being told to look at 'proper' books, which means books without pictures.
As adults, we've seen so much before that we often turn the pages of a picture book without really looking. Young children tend to look more carefully.
Force me to choose my best book, and I always come back to 'Gorilla.' It was the first time I felt I understood what picture books could do.
I didn't have picture books - there weren't many around when I was a child.
Maurice Sendak is the daddy of them all when it comes to picture books - the words, the rhythm, the psychology, the design.
What excites me about picture books is the gap between pictures and words. Sometimes the pictures can tell a slightly different story or tell more about the story, about how someone is thinking or feeling.
Many adults that I have met in my time believed that picture books are 'babyish'. I hope I have changed minds on this, as I set out to do.
One of my main decisions when accepting the job of Children's Laureate was that I must continue working on picture books. If I don't write and illustrate for some time, then I begin to question who I am.
As a father, I understand the importance of the bond that develops through reading picture books with your child.
Picture books are for everybody at any age, not books to be left behind as we grow older. The best ones leave a tantalising gap between the pictures and the words, a gap that is filled by the reader's imagination, adding so much to the excitement of reading a book.
Having a memoir and a retrospective of your work running almost simultaneously when you're still alive does feel a bit posthumous.
