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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
Life
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More quotes by Maurice Sendak
You know who my gods are, who I believe in fervently? Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson - she's probably the top - Mozart, Shakespeare, Keats. These are wonderful gods who have gotten me through the narrow straits of life.
Maurice Sendak
I'm not jaded. I never have been jaded. I've always been surprised at my success. I've always enjoyed it.
Maurice Sendak
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
That's what art is. You don't make up stories. You live your life.
Maurice Sendak
I don't know how to write a children's book.
Maurice Sendak
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
Venturing back further, learning is so slow. Accomplishment is so slow. Experiencing and evaluating your experience is so slow.
Maurice Sendak
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
The fan mail I get from kids are asking me questions which they do not ask their mothers and fathers. Because if they had, why write to me, a perfect stranger?
Maurice Sendak
I write books that seem more suitable for children, and that's OK with me. They are a better audience and tougher critics. Kids tell you what they think, not what they think they should think.
Maurice Sendak
There are certain pieces of music that are always attached to certain books.
Maurice Sendak
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
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
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
And Max, the king of all wild things, was lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all.
Maurice Sendak
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
Children surviving childhood is my obsessive theme and my life's concern.
Maurice Sendak
I think people should be given a test much like driver's tests as to whether they're capable of being parents!
Maurice Sendak
As a kid, all I thought about was death. But you can't tell your parents that.
Maurice Sendak
I wanted to be acknowledged as an artist, not just some kiddie-book artist.
Maurice Sendak
