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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
Knew
Remember
Things
Vividly
Would
Mustn
Scare
Adults
Childhood
Terrible

More quotes by 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.
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Mothers and children are human beings, and they will sometimes do the wrong thing.
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I’m not Hans Christian Andersen. Nobody’s gonna make a statue in the park with a lot of scrambling kids climbing up me. I won’t have it, okay?
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I don't believe in an afterlife but I still fully expect to see my brother again.
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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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My father belonged to a Jewish social club.
Maurice Sendak
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Children surviving childhood is my obsessive theme and my life's concern.
Maurice Sendak
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The day after Paul Newman was dead, he was twice as dead.
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.
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I have to accept my role. I will never kill myself like Vincent Van Gogh. Nor will I paint beautiful water lilies like Monet. I can't do that. I'm in the idiot role of being a kiddie book person.
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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
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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!
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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From their earliest years children live on familiar terms with disrupting emotions, fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of their everyday lives, they continually cope with frustrations as best they can. 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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'Hansel and Gretel' is one of the scariest stories ever written! Psychotic mother stupid, inane father.
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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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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That's what art is. You don't make up stories. You live your life.
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 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