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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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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
Thinking
Missing
Like
Books
Happy
Book
Children
Barbaric
Something
Lots
Time
Childhood
Think
Tough

More quotes by 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.
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Most children - I know I did when I was a kid - fantasize another set of parents. Or fantasize no parents. They don't tell their real parents about that - you don't want to tell Mom and Dad. Kids lead a very private life. And I was a typical child, I think. I was a liar.
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I don't believe in an afterlife but I still fully expect to see my brother again.
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I don't write for children. I write, and somebody says, 'That's for children.'
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I'm getting old. And I'm disappointed in everything just the way old people traditionally, boringly are. That bothers me because is it too traditional? Am I not fighting hard enough? I don't feel the fight. I don't feel it.
Maurice Sendak
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When you hide another story in a story, that’s the story I am telling the children.
Maurice Sendak
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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.
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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.
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I don't know how to write a children's book.
Maurice Sendak
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I never can satisfy some need in me to achieve something of incredible hight. For my sake. It puzzles me deeply. And it sours my life. So there is a permanent dissatisfaction.
Maurice Sendak
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Why is my needle stuck in childhood? I don't know why. I guess it's because that's where my heart is.
Maurice Sendak
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I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can't stop them. They leave me and I love them more.
Maurice Sendak
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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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Life has only gotten better personally for me as I've gotten older. I mean, being young was such a gross waste of time. I was just such a miserable, miserable person.
Maurice Sendak
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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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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.
Maurice Sendak
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You can start making up any kind of story if you want to.
Maurice Sendak
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All I wanted was to be straight so my parents could be happy. They never, never, never knew.
Maurice Sendak
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My life in Brooklyn was in constant danger because of my bad health.
Maurice Sendak
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I remember my own childhood vividly...I knew terrible things. But I knew I mustn't let adults know I knew. It would scare them
Maurice Sendak