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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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You know who my gods are, who I believe in fervently? Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson - she's probably the top - Mozart, Shakespeare, Keats. These are wonderful gods who have gotten me through the narrow straits of life.
Maurice Sendak
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And the walls became the world all around.
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 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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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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And Max, the king of all wild things, was lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all.
Maurice Sendak
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When you hide another story in a story, that’s the story I am telling the children.
Maurice Sendak
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We've educated children to think spontaneity is inappropriate.
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 had been reading a fabulous book [The Man Verdi, by Frank Walker] about [Giuseppe] Verdi, whom I adore.
Maurice Sendak
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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.
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'm totally crazy, I know that.
Maurice Sendak
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Kids lead a very private life.
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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Girls are infinitely more complicated than boys, and women more than men.
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 don't write for children. I write, and somebody says, 'That's for children.'
Maurice Sendak
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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.
Maurice Sendak
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There's so much more to a book than just the reading.
Maurice Sendak