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Children surviving childhood is my obsessive theme and my life's concern.

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
Children
Life
Obsessive
Surviving
Theme
Concern
Childhood

More quotes by Maurice Sendak

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Kids never get pissed at their parents. Unheard of.
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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I'm scared of watching a TV show about vampires. I can't fall asleep.
Maurice Sendak
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The fan mail I get from kids are asking me questions which they do not ask their mothers and fathers. Because if they had, why write to me, a perfect stranger?
Maurice Sendak
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I want to write something so simple, so short and so silly... and I want it to be for my brother.
Maurice Sendak
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I want to be free again. I want to be free like when I was a kid, working with my brother and making toy airplanes and a whole model of the World's Fair in 1939 out of wax.
Maurice Sendak
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I know there are supposedly happy people in this world. I never believed it, but I take it for granted. God knows, they're all on television.
Maurice Sendak
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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
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One of the beauties of being an artist is that you can create a whole new world, with circumstances that are better in your invented world than they are in the real world.
Maurice Sendak
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Mothers and children are human beings, and they will sometimes do the wrong thing.
Maurice Sendak
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Venturing back further, learning is so slow. Accomplishment is so slow. Experiencing and evaluating your experience is so slow.
Maurice Sendak
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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
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Oh, please don't go — we'll eat you up — we love you so!
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 stress character, character, character.
Maurice Sendak
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If children are different from us, they are more spontaneous. Grown-up lives have become overlaid with dross.
Maurice Sendak
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There's so much more to a book than just the reading.
Maurice Sendak
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I became a set designer for opera.
Maurice Sendak
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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
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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