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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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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
Childhood
Terrible
Knew
Remember
Things
Vividly
Would
Mustn
Scare
Adults
More quotes by Maurice Sendak
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
I have been doodling with ink and watercolor on paper all my life. It's my way of stirring up my imagination to see what I find hidden in my head. I call the results dream pictures, fantasy sketches, and even brain-sharpenin g exercises.
Maurice Sendak
One of the few graces of getting old - and God knows there are few graces - is that if you've worked hard and kept your nose to the grindstone, something happens: The body gets old but the creative mechanism is refreshed, smoothed and oiled and honed. That is the grace. That is what's happening to me.
Maurice Sendak
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
As a kid, all I thought about was death. But you can't tell your parents that.
Maurice Sendak
I'm scared of watching a TV show about vampires. I can't fall asleep.
Maurice Sendak
'Hansel and Gretel' is one of the scariest stories ever written! Psychotic mother stupid, inane father.
Maurice Sendak
I don't know how to write a children's book.
Maurice Sendak
Because love is so enormous, the only thing you can think of doing is swallowing the person that you love entirely.
Maurice Sendak
Mothers and children are human beings, and they will sometimes do the wrong thing.
Maurice Sendak
If children are different from us, they are more spontaneous. Grown-up lives have become overlaid with dross.
Maurice Sendak
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
I did not know how to paint a mural. I did not know how to prepare the surface. There was nobody from the Renaissance around who could advise me, and I did the best I could.
Maurice Sendak
I stress character, character, character.
Maurice Sendak
I do not remember any proper children's books in my childhood. I was not exposed to them.
Maurice Sendak
Kids never get pissed at their parents. Unheard of.
Maurice Sendak
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
I had been reading a fabulous book [The Man Verdi, by Frank Walker] about [Giuseppe] Verdi, whom I adore.
Maurice Sendak
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
You can start making up any kind of story if you want to.
Maurice Sendak
