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I became a set designer for opera.

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
Opera
Designer
Became

More quotes by Maurice Sendak

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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.
Maurice Sendak
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All I wanted was to be straight so my parents could be happy. They never, never, never knew.
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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Why is my needle stuck in childhood? I don't know why. I guess it's because that's where my heart is.
Maurice Sendak
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It was a very difficult time. I was working on [umble-Ardy] when my partner and friend was dying of cancer. We set up a room in the house to be like a hospital room. Eugene died, and then I had bypass surgery. I was doing the book to stay sane while all this was going on.
Maurice Sendak
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I want to be free again. I want to be free like when I was a kid, working with my brother and making toy airplanes and a whole model of the World's Fair in 1939 out of wax.
Maurice Sendak
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Because love is so enormous, the only thing you can think of doing is swallowing the person that you love entirely.
Maurice Sendak
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Dreams raise the emotional level of what I'm doing at the moment.
Maurice Sendak
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My life in Brooklyn was in constant danger because of my bad health.
Maurice Sendak
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How do you write for children? I really have never figured that out. So I decided to just ignore it
Maurice Sendak
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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.
Maurice Sendak
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Children surviving childhood is my obsessive theme and my life's concern.
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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As a kid, all I thought about was death. But you can't tell your parents that.
Maurice Sendak
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I'm not jaded. I never have been jaded. I've always been surprised at my success. I've always enjoyed it.
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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Thank God that Bumble-Ardy's parents are dead so we don't have to wonder what they did to him. We only know that they were famous, and famous people have unhappy children for the most part. They don't have the time to take care of them. So he's a troubled pig-boy, a kid you've got to watch.
Maurice Sendak
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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.
Maurice Sendak
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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.
Maurice Sendak
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I want to write something so simple, so short and so silly... and I want it to be for my brother.
Maurice Sendak