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
Somebody
Write
Children
Writing
Says

More quotes by 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
I'm scared of watching a TV show about vampires. I can't fall asleep.
Maurice Sendak
Image
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
Image
Bumble-Ardy is a very wicked little child as far as I'm concerned. He's not to be trusted.
Maurice Sendak
Image
[Drawing] and making things was all we ever did. My brother and I built the entire New York World's Fair of 1939 in miniature out of wax. The floor of our room was covered with little waxen buildings. Nobody else could come in.
Maurice Sendak
Image
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
Image
Herman Melville said that artists have to take a dive and either you hit your head on a rock and you split your skull and you die … or that blow to the head is so inspiring that you come back and do the best work that you ever did. BUT you have to take the dive and you do not know what the results will be.
Maurice Sendak
Image
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?
Maurice Sendak
Image
I know that if there’s a purpose for life, it was for me to hear Mozart.
Maurice Sendak
Image
Certainly we want to protect our children from new and painful experiences that are beyond their emotional comprehension and that intensify anxiety and to a point we can prevent premature exposure to such experiences.
Maurice Sendak
Image
The day after Paul Newman was dead, he was twice as dead.
Maurice Sendak
Image
I became a set designer for opera. I'm a great opera buff, I love classical music, and I needed a time-out.
Maurice Sendak
Image
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
Image
My father could be very witty, even if the humor was always on the darker side of irony.
Maurice Sendak
Image
And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming Wild Things.
Maurice Sendak
Image
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
Image
Why is my needle stuck in childhood? I don't know why. I guess it's because that's where my heart is.
Maurice Sendak
Image
I don't know how to write a children's book.
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
And the walls became the world all around.
Maurice Sendak