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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
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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
Writing
Asking
Fans
Asks
Perfect
Fathers
Father
Mothers
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Mother
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Kids
Questions
More quotes by Maurice Sendak
I became a set designer for opera. I'm a great opera buff, I love classical music, and I needed a time-out.
Maurice Sendak
My father could be very witty, even if the humor was always on the darker side of irony.
Maurice Sendak
You can start making up any kind of story if you want to.
Maurice Sendak
As a child, I felt that books were holy objects, to be caressed, rapturously sniffed, and devotedly provided for. I gave my life to them. I still do. I continue to do what I did as a child dream of books, make books and collect books.
Maurice Sendak
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
That's what art is. You don't make up stories. You live your life.
Maurice Sendak
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
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
I wish you all good things. Live your life, live your life, live your life.
Maurice Sendak
We all want to be renewed, don't we?
Maurice Sendak
As an aspiring artist, you should strive for originality of vision. Have something to say and a fresh way of saying it. No story is worth the writing, no picture worth the making, if it’s not the work of the imagination.
Maurice Sendak
I wanted to be acknowledged as an artist, not just some kiddie-book artist.
Maurice Sendak
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
It is such an abundance of idiocy that you lose courage. That you lose hope. I don't want to lose hope. I get through every day. I'm pretty good. I work. I sleep. I sing. I walk.
Maurice Sendak
Kids never get pissed at their parents. Unheard of.
Maurice Sendak
God, I had great people in my life.
Maurice Sendak
And it's one of the sexiest things you will ever read of how slow you should take the peach. Don't rush it.
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
there is no such thing as fantasy unrelated to reality
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