Maurice Sendak Quotes

My father could be very witty, even if the humor was always on the darker side of irony.

My life in Brooklyn was in constant danger because of my bad health.

Children 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.

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.

All I liked to do when I was a kid was draw.

I don't believe in things literally for children. That's a reduction.

I wish you all good things. Live your life, live your life, live your life.

I don't write for children. I write, and somebody says, 'That's for children.'

I never can satisfy some need in me to achieve something of incredible hight. For my sake. It puzzles me deeply. And it sours my life. So there is a permanent dissatisfaction.

I wanted to be acknowledged as an artist, not just some kiddie-book artist.

That's what art is. You don't make up stories. You live your life.

If I have an unusual gift, it's not that I draw particularly better than other people - I've never fooled myself about that. Rather it's that I remember things other people don't recall: the sounds and feelings and images - the emotional quality - of particular moments in childhood. Happily an essential part of myself - my dreaming life - still lives in the light of childhood.

Children surviving childhood is my obsessive theme and my life's concern.

Illustrations have as much to say as the text. The trick is to say the same thing, but in a different way. It's no good being an illustrator who is saying a lot that is on his or her mind, if it has nothing to do with the text. . . the artist must override the story, but he must also override his own ego for the sake of the story.

I hate, loathe and despise schools.School is bad for you if you have any talent. You should be cultivating that talent in your own particular way.

A book is really like a lover. It arranges itself in your life in a way that is beautiful.

'Hansel and Gretel' is one of the scariest stories ever written! Psychotic mother; stupid, inane father.

There should be a place where only the things you want to happen, happen.

As a kid, all I thought about was death. But you can't tell your parents that.

It's no fun being lonely.

I hate [ebooks]. It's like making believe there's another kind of sex. There isn't another kind of sex. There isn't another kind of book! A book is a book is a book.

I had a brother who was my savior, made my childhood bearable.

I refuse to cater to the bullshit of innocence.

I don't know how to write a children's book.

Childhood is a tricky business. Usually, something goes wrong.

Then from far away across the world he smelled good things to eat, so he gave up being king of the wild things.

I was a very sickly child. My parents were immigrants. They were not decorous. They were not discreet. They always thought I was gonna die.

A whole new world of Italian music was springing up, and [Giuseppe] Verdi was seen as old. Boito got Verdi all excited about the possibility of doing another opera, another kind of opera. In fact, Verdi composed his two best operas, Otello and Falstaff, in his eighties.

I wanted my wild things to be frightening.

Bumble-Ardy looks like a happy book. That's the funniest thing about it. But this was survival. I was working very hard to survive.

Peter Rabbit, for all its gentle tininess, loudly proclaims that no story is worth the writing, no picture worth the making, if it is not a work of imagination.

I want to write something so simple, so short and so silly... and I want it to be for my brother.

I want to be free again. I want to be free like when I was a kid, working with my brother and making toy airplanes and a whole model of the World's Fair in 1939 out of wax.

Girls are infinitely more complicated than boys, and women more than men.

I think there is something barbaric in children, and it's missing in lots of books for them because we don't like to think of it. We want them to be happy [but] childhood is a very tough time.

It is a blessing to get old. It is a blessing to find the time to do the things, to read the books, to listen to the music. I have nothing now but praise for my life.

We all want to be renewed, don't we?

To get a child's trust - you may know or not - is a very hard thing to do. They're so used to not believing adults - because adults tell tales and lies all the time.

The day after Paul Newman was dead, he was twice as dead.

I feel it in me like a woman having a baby, all that life churning inside me. I feel it every day; it moves, stretches, yawns. It's getting ready to be born. It knows exactly what it is.

I have this idiot name tag which says 'controversial.'

Kids tell you what they think, not what they think they should think.

William Blake really is important, my cornerstone. Nobody ever told me before he did that childhood was such a damned serious business.

It was a very difficult time. I was working on [umble-Ardy] when my partner and friend was dying of cancer. We set up a room in the house to be like a hospital room. Eugene died, and then I had bypass surgery. I was doing the book to stay sane while all this was going on.

Mothers and children are human beings, and they will sometimes do the wrong thing.

Oh, I adored Mickey Mouse when I was a child. He was the emblem of happiness and funniness. You went to the movies then, you saw two movies and a short. When Mickey Mouse came on the screen and there was his big head, my sister said she had to hold onto me. I went berserk.

Children are the best living audience in the world because they are so thoroughly honest.

We're animals. We're violent.