“I have this idiot name tag which says ‘controversial.’ I’ve had it since 1965, with Where the Wild Things Are. It’s like Pavlov’s dogs: Every time I do a book, they all carry on. It may be good for business, but it’s tiresome for me. … Grown-ups desperately need to feel safe, and then they project onto the kids. But what none of us seem to realize is how smart kids are. They don’t like what we write for them, what we dish up for them, because it’s vapid, so they’ll go for the hard words, they’ll go for the hard concepts, they’ll go for the stuff where they can learn something, not didactic things, but passionate things.”