Quote

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

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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
Persons
Paint
Kiddie
Person
Kill
Monet
Book
Role
Gogh
Never
Accept
Vincent
Like
Accepting
Lilies
Roles
Vans
Water
Idiot
Beautiful
Recognition

More quotes by Maurice Sendak

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And it's one of the sexiest things you will ever read of how slow you should take the peach. Don't rush it.
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The day after Paul Newman was dead, he was twice as dead.
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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.
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My father belonged to a Jewish social club.
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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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Children surviving childhood is my obsessive theme and my life's concern.
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And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming Wild Things.
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There are certain pieces of music that are always attached to certain books.
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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.
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My father could be very witty, even if the humor was always on the darker side of irony.
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When Mozart is playing in my room, I am in conjunction with something I can't explain... I don't need to. I know that if there's a purpose for life, it was for me to hear Mozart.
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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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A book is really like a lover. It arranges itself in your life in a way that is beautiful. Even as a kid, my sister, who was the eldest, brought books home for me, and I think I spent more time sniffing and touching them than reading. I just remember the joy of the book, the beauty of the binding. The smelling of the interior. Happy.
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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.
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That's what art is. You don't make up stories. You live your life.
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If children are different from us, they are more spontaneous. Grown-up lives have become overlaid with dross.
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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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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.
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My life in Brooklyn was in constant danger because of my bad health.
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Dreams raise the emotional level of what I'm doing at the moment.
Maurice Sendak