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As a kid, all I thought about was death. But you can't tell your parents that.

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
Death
Tell
Kids
Thought
Parents
Parent

More quotes by Maurice Sendak

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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
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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 think people should be given a test much like driver's tests as to whether they're capable of being parents! It's an art form. I talk a lot. And I think a lot. And I draw a lot. But never in a million years would I have been a parent. That's just work that's too hard.
Maurice Sendak
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Kids never get pissed at their parents. Unheard of.
Maurice Sendak
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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
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I don't believe in an afterlife but I still fully expect to see my brother again.
Maurice Sendak
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I had been reading a fabulous book [The Man Verdi, by Frank Walker] about [Giuseppe] Verdi, whom I adore.
Maurice Sendak
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I know that if there’s a purpose for life, it was for me to hear Mozart.
Maurice Sendak
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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.
Maurice Sendak
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I've always loved pigs: the shape of them, the look of them, and the fact that they are so intelligent.
Maurice Sendak
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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
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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
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That's what art is. You don't make up stories. You live your life.
Maurice Sendak
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I wish you all good things. Live your life, live your life, live your life.
Maurice Sendak
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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?
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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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 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
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Children do live in fantasy and reality they move back and forth very easily in a way we no longer remember how to do.
Maurice Sendak
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Dreams raise the emotional level of what I'm doing at the moment.
Maurice Sendak