Herman Melville said that artists have to take a dive and either you hit your head on a rock and you split your skull and you die … or that blow to the head is so inspiring that you come back and do the best work that you ever did. BUT you have to take the dive and you do not know what the results will be.
Maurice SendakI had lost my sister recently, too, which meant that my whole family was gone. I was the baby of the family. There were five Sendaks and there were five Wild Things, and now there's only one Sendak, and he's about to bite the dust, too! Life, as I said before, was very difficult at that time and so it was natural that there would be a change in the look of things. Also, I was very impressed with my own strength in doing this under the circumstances in which I was living.
Maurice SendakYou cannot write for children They're much too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them.
Maurice SendakIt's only adults who read the top layers most of the time. I think children read the internal meanings of everything.
Maurice SendakChildren are tough, though we tend to think of them as fragile. They have to be tough. Childhood is not easy. We sentimentalize children, but they know what's real and what's not. They understand metaphor and symbol. If children are different from us, they are more spontaneous. Grown-up lives have become overlaid with dross.
Maurice Sendak