Maurice Sendak Quotes - Page 3

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

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.

In another project I worked on just a few years ago, a staging of Peter and the Wolf, which I translated into Yiddish and sang on a stage in New York City. Thank God very few people knew I was doing it! But the kids in the audience loved it - even though it was all in Yiddish.

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.

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.

There are so many beautiful things in the world which I will have to leave when I die, but I'm ready, I'm ready, I'm ready.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Oh, please don't go — we'll eat you up — we love you so!

It's only adults who read the top layers most of the time. I think children read the internal meanings of everything.

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 refuse to cater to the bullshit of innocence.

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

We've educated children to think spontaneity is inappropriate.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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