Maurice Sendak Quotes

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.

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

I hate those e-books. They can not be the future... they may well be... I will be dead.

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

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

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

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.

We've educated children to think spontaneity is inappropriate.

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

When you hide another story in a story, that’s the story I am telling the children.

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

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

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.

You can start making up any kind of story if you want to.

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

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

I stress character, character, character.

Kids lead a very private life.

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

I think people should be given a test much like driver's tests as to whether they're capable of being parents!

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 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.

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.

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

Childhood is cannibals and psychotics vomiting in your mouth!

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

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.

In plain terms, a child is a complicated creature who can drive you crazy. There's a cruelty to childhood, there's an anger.

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

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

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

We're animals. We're violent. We're criminal. We're not so far away from the gorillas and the apes, those beautiful creatures.

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.

If you're making it up, make it up good. And then believe in what you made up.

I don't want to lose hope.

That always seemed to be the most critical test that a child was confronted with - loss of parents, loss of direction, loss of love. Can you live without a mother and a father?

Why is my needle stuck in childhood? I don't know why. I guess it's because that's where my heart is.

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.

Kids books Grownup books That's just marketing. Books are books.

God, I had great people in my life.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Kids never get pissed at their parents. Unheard of.

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.

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

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

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