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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.

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
Writing
Audience
Think
Write
Thinking
Tell
Kids
Tougher
Seems
Suitable
Better
Critics
Book
Seem
Children
Books

More quotes by Maurice Sendak

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Inside all of us is... hope. Inside all of us is... fear. Inside all of us is... adventure. Inside all of us is a wild thing.
Maurice Sendak
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there is no such thing as fantasy unrelated to reality
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 cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can't stop them. They leave me and I love them more.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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I often went to bed without supper cause I hated my mother's cooking. So, to go to bed without supper was not a torture to me. If she was gonna hurt me, she'd make me eat.
Maurice Sendak
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I do not remember any proper children's books in my childhood. I was not exposed to them.
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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One of the beauties of being an artist is that you can create a whole new world, with circumstances that are better in your invented world than they are in the real world.
Maurice Sendak
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There's a mystery there, a clue, a nut, a bolt, and if I put it together, I find me.
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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As a child, I felt that books were holy objects, to be caressed, rapturously sniffed, and devotedly provided for. I gave my life to them. I still do. I continue to do what I did as a child dream of books, make books and collect books.
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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Dreams raise the emotional level of what I'm doing at the moment.
Maurice Sendak