Quote

In plain terms, a child is a complicated creature who can drive you crazy. There's a cruelty to childhood, there's an anger.

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
Crazy
Creature
Child
Cruelty
Term
Drive
Children
Complicated
Anger
Childhood
Creatures
Terms
Plain

More quotes by Maurice Sendak

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You can't get rid of evil. We can't, and I feel that so intensely.
Maurice Sendak
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To be a healthy person, you have to be sympathetic to the child you once were and maintain the continuity between you as a child and you as an adult.
Maurice Sendak
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It is such an abundance of idiocy that you lose courage. That you lose hope. I don't want to lose hope. I get through every day. I'm pretty good. I work. I sleep. I sing. I walk.
Maurice Sendak
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I wanted my wild things to be frightening.
Maurice Sendak
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And the walls became the world all around.
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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Children are tough, though we tend to think of them as fragile. They have to be tough. Childhood is not easy. We sentimentalize children, but they know what's real and what's not. They understand metaphor and symbol. If children are different from us, they are more spontaneous. Grown-up lives have become overlaid with dross.
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?
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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.
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I have a little tiny Emily Dickinson so big that I carry in my pocket everywhere. And you just read three poems of Emily. She is so brave. She is so strong. She is such a sexy, passionate, little woman. I feel better.
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A whole new world of Italian music was springing up, and [Giuseppe] Verdi was seen as old. Boito got Verdi all excited about the possibility of doing another opera, another kind of opera. In fact, Verdi composed his two best operas, Otello and Falstaff, in his eighties.
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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I'm totally crazy, I know that. I don't say that to be a smartass, but I know that that's the very essence of what makes my work good. And I know my work is good. Not everybody likes it, that's fine. I don't do it for everybody. Or anybody. I do it because I can't not do it.
Maurice Sendak
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I'm totally crazy, I know that.
Maurice Sendak
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I've always loved pigs: the shape of them, the look of them, and the fact that they are so intelligent.
Maurice Sendak
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I'd like to believe an accumulation of experience has made me a sort of a grown-up person, so I can have judgment and taste and whatever.
Maurice Sendak
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My father belonged to a Jewish social club.
Maurice Sendak
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What is the point of it all? Not leaving legacies. But being ripe. Being ripe.
Maurice Sendak
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Girls are infinitely more complicated than boys, and women more than men.
Maurice Sendak
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It was a very difficult time. I was working on [umble-Ardy] when my partner and friend was dying of cancer. We set up a room in the house to be like a hospital room. Eugene died, and then I had bypass surgery. I was doing the book to stay sane while all this was going on.
Maurice Sendak