Best 160 quotes of Maurice Sendak on MyQuotes

Maurice Sendak

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    Maurice Sendak

    A book is really like a lover. It arranges itself in your life in a way that is beautiful. Even as a kid, my sister, who was the eldest, brought books home for me, and I think I spent more time sniffing and touching them than reading. I just remember the joy of the book, the beauty of the binding. The smelling of the interior. Happy.

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    Maurice Sendak

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

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    Maurice Sendak

    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.

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    Maurice Sendak

    And [he] sailed back over a year and in and out of weeks and through a day and into the night of his very own room where he found his supper waiting for him and it was still hot

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    Maurice Sendak

    And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming Wild Things.

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    Maurice Sendak

    And Max, the king of all wild things, was lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all.

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    Maurice Sendak

    And the walls became the world all around.

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    Maurice Sendak

    And the wild things roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws.

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    Maurice Sendak

    An illustrator in my own mind - and this is not a truth of any kind - is someone who so falls in love with writing that he wishes he had written it, and the closest he can get to is illustrating it. And the next thing you learn, you have to find something unique in this book, which perhaps even the author was not entirely aware of. And that's what you hold on to, and that's what you add to the pictures: a whole Other Story that you believe in, that you think is there.

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    Maurice Sendak

    Art has always been my salvation. And my gods are Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Mozart. I believe in them with all my heart. And when Mozart is playing in my room, I am in conjunction with something I can’t explain — I don’t need to. I know that if there’s a purpose for life, it was for me to hear Mozart. Or if I walk in the woods and I see an animal, the purpose of my life was to see that animal. I can recollect it, I can notice it. I’m here to take note of. And that is beyond my ego, beyond anything that belongs to me, an observer, an observer.

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    Maurice Sendak

    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.

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    Maurice Sendak

    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.

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    Maurice Sendak

    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.

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    Maurice Sendak

    Because love is so enormous, the only thing you can think of doing is swallowing the person that you love entirely.

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    Maurice Sendak

    Bumble-Ardy is a very wicked little child as far as I'm concerned. He's not to be trusted.

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    Maurice Sendak

    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.

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    Maurice Sendak

    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.

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    Maurice Sendak

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

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    Maurice Sendak

    Childhood is cannibals and psychotics vomiting in your mouth!

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    Maurice Sendak

    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.

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    Maurice Sendak

    Children do live in fantasy and reality; they move back and forth very easily in a way we no longer remember how to do.

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    Maurice Sendak

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

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    Maurice Sendak

    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.

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    Maurice Sendak

    [Drawing] and making things was all we ever did. My brother and I built the entire New York World's Fair of 1939 in miniature out of wax. The floor of our room was covered with little waxen buildings. Nobody else could come in.

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    Maurice Sendak

    Dreams raise the emotional level of what I'm doing at the moment.

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    Maurice Sendak

    Each month is gay, Each season nice, When eating Chicken soup With rice

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    Maurice Sendak

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

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    Maurice Sendak

    For my father the one calamity was that my brother and sister and I never learned to swim. My father, who was very macho, was a strong swimmer and was terribly disappointed to have children who didn't swim. Once when my mother was sitting in a beach chair - I can still see the big umbrella - she called to my father, "Throw them in! Throw them in! They'll swim!" So he did. Then he looked down, and there were the three Sendak children lying perfectly still underwater, not fighting for life!

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    Maurice Sendak

    From their earliest years children live on familiar terms with disrupting emotions, fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of their everyday lives, they continually cope with frustrations as best they can. And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming Wild Things.

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    Maurice Sendak

    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.

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    Maurice Sendak

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

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    Maurice Sendak

    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.

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    Maurice Sendak

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

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    Maurice Sendak

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

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    Maurice Sendak

    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.

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    Maurice Sendak

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

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    Maurice Sendak

    I became a set designer for opera.

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    Maurice Sendak

    I believe there is no part of our lives, our adult as well as child life, when we're not fantasizing, but we prefer to relegate fantasy to children, as though it were some tomfoolery only fit for the immature minds of the young. Children do live in fantasy and reality; they move back and forth very easily in a way we no longer remember how to do.

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    Maurice Sendak

    I can't believe I've turned into a typical old man. I can't believe it. I was young just minutes ago.

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    Maurice Sendak

    I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can't stop them. They leave me and I love them more.

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    Maurice Sendak

    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.

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    Maurice Sendak

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

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    Maurice Sendak

    I don't believe in an afterlife but I still fully expect to see my brother again.

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    Maurice Sendak

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

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    Maurice Sendak

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

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    Maurice Sendak

    If children are different from us, they are more spontaneous. Grown-up lives have become overlaid with dross.

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    Maurice Sendak

    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.

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    Maurice Sendak

    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.

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    Maurice Sendak

    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.

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    Maurice Sendak

    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.