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

More quotes by 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.
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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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I'm writing a poem right now about a nose. I've always wanted to write a poem about a nose. But it's a ludicrous subject. That's why, when I was younger, I was afraid of [writing] something that didn't make a lot of sense. But now I'm not. I have nothing to worry about. It doesn't matter.
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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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I wish you all good things. Live your life, live your life, live your life.
Maurice Sendak
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The day after Paul Newman was dead, he was twice as dead.
Maurice Sendak
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I stress character, character, character.
Maurice Sendak
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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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One of the few graces of getting old - and God knows there are few graces - is that if you've worked hard and kept your nose to the grindstone, something happens: The body gets old but the creative mechanism is refreshed, smoothed and oiled and honed. That is the grace. That is what's happening to me.
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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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And Max, the king of all wild things, was lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all.
Maurice Sendak
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I wanted to be acknowledged as an artist, not just some kiddie-book artist.
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 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
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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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Oh, please don't go — we'll eat you up — we love you so!
Maurice Sendak
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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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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.
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Dreams raise the emotional level of what I'm doing at the moment.
Maurice Sendak
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My father belonged to a Jewish social club.
Maurice Sendak