Quote

I don't write for children. I write, and somebody says, 'That's for children.'

Maurice Sendak

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Write
Children
Writing
Says
Somebody

More quotes by Maurice Sendak

Image
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
Image
If children are different from us, they are more spontaneous. Grown-up lives have become overlaid with dross.
Maurice Sendak
Image
I'm not jaded. I never have been jaded. I've always been surprised at my success. I've always enjoyed it.
Maurice Sendak
Image
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
Image
Newt Gingrich is an idiot of great renown... There's something so hopelessly gross and vile about him it's hard to take him seriously.
Maurice Sendak
Image
My father could be very witty, even if the humor was always on the darker side of irony.
Maurice Sendak
Image
Children surviving childhood is my obsessive theme and my life's concern.
Maurice Sendak
Image
That's what art is. You don't make up stories. You live your life.
Maurice Sendak
Image
I know that if there’s a purpose for life, it was for me to hear Mozart.
Maurice Sendak
Image
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.
Maurice Sendak
Image
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
Image
As an aspiring artist, you should strive for originality of vision. Have something to say and a fresh way of saying it. No story is worth the writing, no picture worth the making, if it’s not the work of the imagination.
Maurice Sendak
Image
Bumble-Ardy is a very wicked little child as far as I'm concerned. He's not to be trusted.
Maurice Sendak
Image
I'm scared of watching a TV show about vampires. I can't fall asleep.
Maurice Sendak
Image
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
Image
I never set out to write books for children. I don't have a feeling that I'm gonna save children or my life is devoted.
Maurice Sendak
Image
I've always loved pigs: the shape of them, the look of them, and the fact that they are so intelligent.
Maurice Sendak
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I think people should be given a test much like driver's tests as to whether they're capable of being parents!
Maurice Sendak