Quote

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

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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
Climbing
Gonna
Andersen
Okay
Scrambling
Nobody
Hans
Christian
Statue
Kids
Statues
Make
Park
Parks

More quotes by Maurice Sendak

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[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.
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Children surviving childhood is my obsessive theme and my life's concern.
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Oh, please don't go — we'll eat you up — we love you so!
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Emeralds,' said the rabbit. 'Emeralds make a lovely gift.
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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.
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That's what art is. You don't make up stories. You live your life.
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God, I had great people in my life.
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You can start making up any kind of story if you want to.
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You can't get rid of evil. We can't, and I feel that so intensely.
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We're animals. We're violent. We're criminal. We're not so far away from the gorillas and the apes, those beautiful creatures.
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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.
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Parents shouldn't assume children are made out of sugar candy and will break and collapse instantly. Kids don't. We do.
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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
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I'm totally crazy, I know that.
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 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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My father could be very witty, even if the humor was always on the darker side of irony.
Maurice Sendak
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You know who my gods are, who I believe in fervently? Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson - she's probably the top - Mozart, Shakespeare, Keats. These are wonderful gods who have gotten me through the narrow straits of life.
Maurice Sendak
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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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Because love is so enormous, the only thing you can think of doing is swallowing the person that you love entirely.
Maurice Sendak