Maurice Sendak Quotations

When I did 'Bumble-ardy,' I was so intensely aware of death. Eugene, my friend and partner, was dying here in the house when I did 'Bumble-ardy'. I did 'Bumble-ardy' to save myself. I did not want to die with him. I wanted to live, as any human being does.

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.

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

There must be more to life than having everything.

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

I want to be alone and work until the day my heads hits the drawing table and I'm dead. Kaput. I feel very much like I want to be with my brother and sister again. They're nowhere. I know they're nowhere and they don't exist, but if nowhere means that's where they are, that's where I want to be.

Most children - I know I did when I was a kid - fantasize another set of parents. Or fantasize no parents. They don't tell their real parents about that - you don't want to tell Mom and Dad. Kids lead a very private life. And I was a typical child, I think. I was a liar.

I adored Mickey Mouse when I was a child. He was the emblem of happiness and funniness.

I have to accept my role. I will never kill myself like Vincent Van Gogh. Nor will I paint beautiful water lilies like Monet. I can't do that. I'm in the idiot role of being a kiddie book person.

You cannot write for children They're much too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them.

I've always loved pigs: the shape of them, the look of them, and the fact that they are so intelligent.

There's so much more to a book than just the reading.

Grown-ups are afraid for children. It's not children who are afraid.

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.

The distinctions of fine art bore me to death.

Kids don't know about best sellers. They go for what they enjoy. They aren't star chasers and they don't suck up. It's why I like them.

Parents shouldn't assume children are made out of sugar candy and will break and collapse instantly. Kids don't. We do.

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

I'm not obsessed with angels but I do adore angels.

You know who my gods are, who I believe in fervently? Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson - she's probably the top - Mozart, Shakespeare, Keats. These are wonderful gods who have gotten me through the narrow straits of life.

Certainly we want to protect our children from new and painful experiences that are beyond their emotional comprehension and that intensify anxiety; and to a point we can prevent premature exposure to such experiences.

All I wanted was to be straight so my parents could be happy.

As a kid, all I thought about was death.

My being gay was something of not great interest to me.

I don't have kids at all and I thank God that I never did.

I don't know what to make of it, exactly, but I am so for it, ... I am in love with it. If Spike and Dave do not do this movie, now, I would just as soon not see any version of it ever get made.

What I do as best I can is out of a deep respect for children, for how difficult their world is.

I hate those e-books. They cannot be the future. They may well be.

I cry a lot because I miss people.

Girls are infinitely more complicated than boys and women more than men. And there's no doubt about that. We just don't like to think about it. Certainly the men don't like to think about it.

He was the strangest little bird I'd ever seen. He had fluttered into the world of the studios and, could he not be swatted dead, I knew he would manage. I had total faith in him.

I feel like I don't have a lot of time left.

What most people wanted was a reproduction of the book, because the book made money,

My parents were ignorant peasants from the Old World.

My work is not great, but it's respectable.

My work is not great, but it's respectable. I have no false illusions.

I'm still as enamored and turned on by work as I was when I was young.

It dawned on me that art was the way I could survive.

Do parents sit down and tell their kids everything? I don't know. I don't know.

I've convinced myself - I hope I'm right - that children despair of you if you don't tell them the truth.

Yes, there have to be places for safe wonderful stories.

We're supposed to do all these things which trouble us deeply because it's so against what we naturally would want to do.

People from New York have been calling, to see if I'm still alive. When I answer the phone, you can hear the disappointment in their voice.

Finding out that I was gay when I was older was a shock and a disappointment.

I'm an illustrator. I have to accept my role.

I only have one subject. The question I am obsessed with is: How do children survive?

I'm not Hans Christian Anderson. Nobody's gonna make a statue in the park with a lot of scrambling kids climbing up me. I won't have it, okay?

I didn't have much confidence in myself... never.

The world is twice as crazy as it's ever been.

Things come to you without you necessarily knowing what they mean.

You can't write masterpieces in your 80s and be happy too.

A book is a book is a book.

I am not a religious person, nor do I have any regrets.

I can't believe I've turned into a typical old man.

I don't write for children. I write and someone says it's for children.

Kids lead a very private life.

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

I'm getting old. And I'm disappointed in everything just the way old people traditionally, boringly are. That bothers me because is it too traditional? Am I not fighting hard enough? I don't feel the fight. I don't feel it.

I'm scared of watching a TV show about vampires. I can't fall asleep.

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

I'd like to believe an accumulation of experience has made me a sort of a grown-up person, so I can have judgment and taste and whatever.

My big concern is me and what do I do now until the time of my death. That is valid. That is useful. That is beautiful. That is creative.

I do not remember any proper children's books in my childhood. I was not exposed to them.

Inside all of us is HOPE. Inside all of us is FEAR. Inside all of us is ADVENTURE. Inside all of us is A WILD THING.

I stress character, character, character.

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.

What is the point of it all? Not leaving legacies. But being ripe. Being ripe.

Art has always been my salvation.

How do you write for children? I really have never figured that out. So I decided to just ignore it

I became a set designer for opera. I'm a great opera buff, I love classical music, and I needed a time-out.

I have been doodling with ink and watercolor on paper all my life. It's my way of stirring up my imagination to see what I find hidden in my head. I call the results dream pictures, fantasy sketches, and even brain-sharpenin g exercises.

The magic of childhood is the strangeness of childhood — the uniqueness that makes us see things that other people don't see.

I want to see me to the end working, living for myself. Ripeness is all.

Life has only gotten better personally for me as I've gotten older. I mean, being young was such a gross waste of time. I was just such a miserable, miserable person.

Venturing back further, learning is so slow. Accomplishment is so slow. Experiencing and evaluating your experience is so slow.

Truthfullness to life-both fantasy life and factual life-is the basis of all great art.

There are certain pieces of music that are always attached to certain books.

If there's any advice I have to give, I would say it's that. If you're looking for a way to get closer to your kids, there ain't no better way than to grab 'em and read. And if you put them in front of a computer or a TV, you are abandoning them. You are abandoning them because they are sitting on a couch or a floor and they may be hugging a dog, but they ain't hugging you.

I am not a religious person, nor do I have any regrets. The war took care of that for me. You know, I was brought up strictly kosher, but I - it made no sense to me. It made no sense to me what was happening. So nothing of it means anything to me. Nothing. Except these few little trivial things that are related to being Jewish. ... You know who my gods are, who I believe in fervently? Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson - she's probably the top - Mozart, Shakespeare, Keats. These are wonderful gods who have gotten me through the narrow straits of life.

One of the beauties of being an artist is that you can create a whole new world, with circumstances that are better in your invented world than they are in the real world.

To be a healthy person, you have to be sympathetic to the child you once were and maintain the continuity between you as a child and you as an adult.

There's something in this country that is so opposed to understanding the complexity of children.

As an aspiring artist, you should strive for originality of vision. Have something to say and a fresh way of saying it. No story is worth the writing, no picture worth the making, if it’s not the work of the imagination.

All I liked to do when I was a kid was draw. My childhood was like my adult life: drawing pictures with my brother, putting the comics up on the glass window, and tracing the characters onto tracing paper or drawing paper and then coloring them. That and making things was all we ever did.

If life is so critical, if Anne Frank could die, if my friend could die, children were as vulnerable as adults, and that gave me a secret purpose to my work, to make them live. Because I wanted to live. I wanted to grow up.

I became a set designer for opera.

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.

I'm writing a poem right now about a nose. I've always wanted to write a poem about a nose. But it's a ludicrous subject. That's why, when I was younger, I was afraid of [writing] something that didn't make a lot of sense. But now I'm not. I have nothing to worry about. It doesn't matter.

I never spent less than two years on the text of one of my picture books, even though each of them is approximately 380 words long. Only when the text is finished ... do I begin the pictures.

I'm not jaded. I never have been jaded. I've always been surprised at my success. I've always enjoyed it.

I would infinitely prefer a daughter.

I remember my own childhood vividly...I knew terrible things. But I knew I mustn't let adults know I knew. It would scare them

Emeralds,' said the rabbit. 'Emeralds make a lovely gift.

Newt Gingrich is an idiot of great renown... There's something so hopelessly gross and vile about him it's hard to take him seriously.

We're animals. We're violent. We're criminal. And if I've done anything, I've had kids express themselves as they are.

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

All I wanted was to be straight so my parents could be happy. They never, never, never knew.

There's a mystery there, a clue, a nut, a bolt, and if I put it together, I find me.