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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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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
Create
Artist
Better
Whole
Real
World
Beauties
Invented
Circumstances

More quotes by 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
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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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I don't write for children. I write, and somebody says, 'That's for children.'
Maurice Sendak
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If you're making it up, make it up good. And then believe in what you made up.
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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Dreams raise the emotional level of what I'm doing at the moment.
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 don't believe in an afterlife but I still fully expect to see my brother again.
Maurice Sendak
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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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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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It was inconceivable to me as a child that I would be an adult. I mean, one assumed that it would happen, but obviously it didn't happen, or if it did, it happened when your back was turned, and then suddenly you were there. So I couldn't have thought about it much.
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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Thank God that Bumble-Ardy's parents are dead so we don't have to wonder what they did to him. We only know that they were famous, and famous people have unhappy children for the most part. They don't have the time to take care of them. So he's a troubled pig-boy, a kid you've got to watch.
Maurice Sendak
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Kids don't know about best sellers. They go for what they enjoy. They aren't star chasers and they don't suck up. It's why I like them.
Maurice Sendak
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I don't know how to write a children's book.
Maurice Sendak
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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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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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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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The day after Paul Newman was dead, he was twice as dead.
Maurice Sendak
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I'm scared of watching a TV show about vampires. I can't fall asleep.
Maurice Sendak