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I never set out to write books for children. I don't have a feeling that I'm gonna save children or my life is devoted.

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
Children
Devoted
Writing
Gonna
Never
Save
Life
Books
Feeling
Write
Feelings
Book

More quotes by Maurice Sendak

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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.
Maurice Sendak
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I became a set designer for opera. I'm a great opera buff, I love classical music, and I needed a time-out.
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I wanted to be acknowledged as an artist, not just some kiddie-book artist.
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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.
Maurice Sendak
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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.
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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The day after Paul Newman was dead, he was twice as dead.
Maurice Sendak
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We all want to be renewed, don't we?
Maurice Sendak
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As a kid, all I thought about was death. But you can't tell your parents that.
Maurice Sendak
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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.
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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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.
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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From their earliest years children live on familiar terms with disrupting emotions, fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of their everyday lives, they continually cope with frustrations as best they can. And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming Wild Things.
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 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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If children are different from us, they are more spontaneous. Grown-up lives have become overlaid with dross.
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 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