Top 100 Maurice Sendak Quotes
#1. Knowledge is the driving force that puts creative passion to work.
Maurice Sendak
#3. Each month is gay, Each season nice, When eating Chicken soup With rice
Maurice Sendak
#4. My father could be very witty, even if the humor was always on the darker side of irony.
Maurice Sendak
#5. There's something in this country that is so opposed to understanding the complexity of children.
Maurice Sendak
#6. 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.
Maurice Sendak
#7. Kids never get pissed at their parents. Unheard of.
Maurice Sendak
#9. 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.
Maurice Sendak
#11. 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.
Maurice Sendak
#12. As a child, I felt that books were holy objects, to be caressed, rapturously sniffed, and devotedly provided for. I gave my life to them. I still do. I continue to do what I did as a child; dream of books, make books and collect books.
Maurice Sendak
#13. I am not a religious person, nor do I have any regrets.
Maurice Sendak
#14. 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?
Maurice Sendak
#15. In plain terms, a child is a complicated creature who can drive you crazy. There's a cruelty to childhood, there's an anger.
Maurice Sendak
#17. 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.
Maurice Sendak
#18. That's what art is. You don't make up stories. You live your life.
Maurice Sendak
#19. 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.
Maurice Sendak
#20. Oh, please don't go - we'll eat you up - we love you so!
Maurice Sendak
#21. 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.
Maurice Sendak
#22. 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.
Maurice Sendak
#23. You can't write masterpieces in your 80s and be happy too.
Maurice Sendak
#25. 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.
Maurice Sendak
#26. 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.
Maurice Sendak
#27. I do not remember any proper children's books in my childhood. I was not exposed to them.
Maurice Sendak
#28. When you hide another story in a story, that's the story I am telling the children.
Maurice Sendak
#29. There must be more to life than having everything!
Maurice Sendak
#30. It is such an abundance of idiocy that you lose courage. That you lose hope. I don't want to lose hope. I get through every day. I'm pretty good. I work. I sleep. I sing. I walk.
Maurice Sendak
#31. If you're making it up, make it up good. And then believe in what you made up.
Maurice Sendak
#32. 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.
Maurice Sendak
#34. I've always loved pigs: the shape of them, the look of them, and the fact that they are so intelligent.
Maurice Sendak
#35. We're supposed to do all these things which trouble us deeply because it's so against what we naturally would want to do.
Maurice Sendak
#36. I did not know how to paint a mural. I did not know how to prepare the surface. There was nobody from the Renaissance around who could advise me, and I did the best I could.
Maurice Sendak
#41. I'm not jaded. I never have been jaded. I've always been surprised at my success. I've always enjoyed it.
Maurice Sendak
#42. I'm scared of watching a TV show about vampires. I can't fall asleep.
Maurice Sendak
#43. The fan mail I get from kids are asking me questions which they do not ask their mothers and fathers. Because if they had, why write to me, a perfect stranger?
Maurice Sendak
#44. 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.
Maurice Sendak
#46. I mean, being a child was being a child, was being a creature without power, without pocket money, without escape routes of any kind. So I didn't want to be a child.
Maurice Sendak
#47. I'm totally crazy, I know that. I don't say that to be a smartass, but I know that that's the very essence of what makes my work good. And I know my work is good. Not everybody likes it, that's fine. I don't do it for everybody. Or anybody. I do it because I can't not do it.
Maurice Sendak
#49. My life in Brooklyn was in constant danger because of my bad health.
Maurice Sendak
#50. Sipping once, sipping twice, sipping chicken soup with rice.
Maurice Sendak
#51. I adored Mickey Mouse when I was a child. He was the emblem of happiness and funniness.
Maurice Sendak
#52. What is the point of it all? Not leaving legacies. But being ripe. Being ripe.
Maurice Sendak
#53. 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.
Maurice Sendak
#54. You cannot write for children. They're much too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them.
Maurice Sendak
#55. Emeralds,' said the rabbit. 'Emeralds make a lovely gift.
Maurice Sendak
#58. I have a little tiny Emily Dickinson so big that I carry in my pocket everywhere. And you just read three poems of Emily. She is so brave. She is so strong. She is such a sexy, passionate, little woman. I feel better.
Maurice Sendak
#59. Then from far away across the world he smelled good things to eat, so he gave up being king of the wild things.
Maurice Sendak
#60. I wish you all good things. Live your life, live your life, live your life.
Maurice Sendak
#61. I'm gay. I just didn't think it was anybody's business.
Maurice Sendak
#62. I write books that seem more suitable for children, and that's OK with me. They are a better audience and tougher critics. Kids tell you what they think, not what they think they should think.
Maurice Sendak
#63. 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.
Maurice Sendak
#64. My being gay was something of not great interest to me.
Maurice Sendak
#65. One of the few graces of getting old-and God knows there are few graces-is that if you've worked hard and kept your nose to the grindstone, something happens: The body gets old but the creative mechanism is refreshed, smoothed and oiled and honed. That is the grace. That is what's happening to me.
Maurice Sendak
#66. My parents were ignorant peasants from the Old World.
Maurice Sendak
#67. Childhood is cannibals and psychotics vomiting in your mouth!
Maurice Sendak
#68. 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.
Maurice Sendak
#69. I don't believe in an afterlife but I still fully expect to see my brother again.
Maurice Sendak
#70. I never set out to write books for children. I don't have a feeling that I'm gonna save children or my life is devoted.
Maurice Sendak
#71. 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.
Maurice Sendak
#72. I only have one subject. The question I am obsessed with is: How do children survive?
Maurice Sendak
#73. 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.
Maurice Sendak
#74. Because love is so enormous, the only thing you can think of doing is swallowing the person that you love entirely.
Maurice Sendak
#75. 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.
Maurice Sendak
#76. 'Hansel and Gretel' is one of the scariest stories ever written! Psychotic mother; stupid, inane father.
Maurice Sendak
#77. I hate those e-books. They can not be the future ... they may well be ... I will be dead.
Maurice Sendak
#78. 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 something that didn't make a lot of sense. But now I'm not. I have nothing to worry about. It doesn't matter.
Maurice Sendak
#80. I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can't stop them. They leave me and I love them more.
Maurice Sendak
#81. There is no such thing as fantasy unrelated to reality
Maurice Sendak
#82. Grown-ups are afraid for children. It's not children who are afraid.
Maurice Sendak
#84. And it's one of the sexiest things you will ever read of how slow you should take the peach. Don't rush it.
Maurice Sendak
#85. And the wild things roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws.
Maurice Sendak
#87. I really don't like the city anymore. You get pushed and harassed and people grope you. It's too tumultuous. It's too crazy.
Maurice Sendak
#88. Why is my needle stuck in childhood? I don't know why. I guess it's because that's where my heart is.
Maurice Sendak
#89. I want to see me to the end working, living for myself. Ripeness is all.
Maurice Sendak
#90. Finding out that I was gay when I was older was a shock and a disappointment.
Maurice Sendak
#92. There should be a place where only the things you want to happen, happen
Maurice Sendak
#94. It's only adults who read the top layers most of the time. I think children read the internal meanings of everything.
Maurice Sendak
#97. We're supposed to be civilized. We're supposed to go to work every day. We're supposed to be nice to our friends and send Christmas cards to our parents.
Maurice Sendak
#98. I remember how much - when I was a small boy I was taken to see a version of 'Peter Pan.' I detested it. I mean, the sentimental idea that anybody would want to remain a boy.
Maurice Sendak
#99. It dawned on me that art was the way I could survive.
Maurice Sendak
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