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

Maurice Sendak

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Maurice Sendak
Age: 83 †
Born: 1928
Born: June 10
Died: 2012
Died: May 8
Artist
Cartoonist
Graphic Designer
Illustrator
Painter
Screenwriter
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Maurice Bernard Sendak
Controversial
Idiot
Says
Name
Names
Tag

More quotes by Maurice Sendak

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And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming Wild Things.
Maurice Sendak
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Emeralds,' said the rabbit. 'Emeralds make a lovely gift.
Maurice Sendak
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Girls are infinitely more complicated than boys, and women more than men.
Maurice Sendak
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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.
Maurice Sendak
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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.
Maurice Sendak
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If children are different from us, they are more spontaneous. Grown-up lives have become overlaid with dross.
Maurice Sendak
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I know there are supposedly happy people in this world. I never believed it, but I take it for granted. God knows, they're all on television.
Maurice Sendak
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The day after Paul Newman was dead, he was twice as dead.
Maurice Sendak
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It was inconceivable to me as a child that I would be an adult. I mean, one assumed that it would happen, but obviously it didn't happen, or if it did, it happened when your back was turned, and then suddenly you were there. So I couldn't have thought about it much.
Maurice Sendak
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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.
Maurice Sendak
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God, I had great people in my life.
Maurice Sendak
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I wanted my wild things to be frightening.
Maurice Sendak
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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
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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.
Maurice Sendak
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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
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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
Maurice Sendak
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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.
Maurice Sendak
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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
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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
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My life in Brooklyn was in constant danger because of my bad health.
Maurice Sendak