Top 239 Quotes & Sayings by Maurice Sendak - Page 3

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?

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.

I hate [ebooks]. It's like making believe there's another kind of sex. There isn't another kind of sex. There isn't another kind of book! A book is a book is a book.

I hate, loathe and despise schools.School is bad for you if you have any talent. You should be cultivating that talent in your own particular way.

I was sickly as a child and gravitated to books and drawing. During my early teen years, I spent hundreds of hours at my window, sketching neighborhood children at play. I sketched and listened, and those notebooks became the fertile field of my work later on. There is not a book I have written or a picture I have drawn that does not, in some way, owe them its existence.

I refuse to cater to the bullshit of innocence.

Oh, please don't go — we'll eat you up — we love you so!

Children surviving childhood is my obsessive theme and my life's concern.

It's only adults who read the top layers most of the time. I think children read the internal meanings of everything.

What is the point of it all? Not leaving legacies. But being ripe. Being ripe.

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.

It is a blessing to get old. It is a blessing to find the time to do the things, to read the books, to listen to the music. I have nothing now but praise for my life.

All I liked to do when I was a kid was draw.

If there's any advice I have to give, I would say it's that. If you're looking for a way to get closer to your kids, there ain't no better way than to grab 'em and read. And if you put them in front of a computer or a TV, you are abandoning them. You are abandoning them because they are sitting on a couch or a floor and they may be hugging a dog, but they ain't hugging you.

Because love is so enormous, the only thing you can think of doing is swallowing the person that you love entirely.

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.

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

Why is my needle stuck in childhood? I don't know why. I guess it's because that's where my heart is.

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.

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.

That's what art is. You don't make up stories. You live your life.

I don't write for children. I write, and somebody says, 'That's for children.'

I think it is unnatural to think that there is such a thing as a blue-sky, white-clouded happy childhood for anybody. Childhood is a very, very tricky business of surviving it. Because if one thing goes wrong or anything goes wrong, and usually something goes wrong, then you are compromised as a human being. You're going to trip over that for a good part of your life.

And Max, the king of all wild things, was lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all.

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.

I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can't stop them. They leave me and I love them more.

Then from far away across the world he smelled good things to eat, so he gave up being king of the wild things.

Peter Rabbit, for all its gentle tininess, loudly proclaims that no story is worth the writing, no picture worth the making, if it is not a work of imagination.

Truthfullness to life-both fantasy life and factual life-is the basis of all great art.

There are so many beautiful things in the world which I will have to leave when I die, but I'm ready, I'm ready, I'm ready.

We're animals. We're violent. We're criminal. We're not so far away from the gorillas and the apes, those beautiful creatures.

And the wild things roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws.

I'm totally crazy, I know that. I don't say that to be a smartass, but I know that that's the very essence of what makes my work good. And I know my work is good. Not everybody likes it, that's fine. I don't do it for everybody. Or anybody. I do it because I can't not do it.

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.

When you hide another story in a story, that’s the story I am telling the children.

Grown-ups desperately need to feel safe, and then they project onto the kids. But what none of us seem to realize is how smart kids are. They don’t like what we write for them, what we dish up for them, because it’s vapid, so they’ll go for the hard words, they’ll go for the hard concepts, they’ll go for the stuff where they can learn something. Not didactic things, but passionate things.

We've educated children to think spontaneity is inappropriate.

Emeralds,' said the rabbit. 'Emeralds make a lovely gift.

We’ve educated children to think that spontaneity is inappropriate. Children are willing to expose themselves to experiences. We aren’t. Grownups always say they protect their children, but they’re really protecting themselves. Besides, you can’t protect children. They know everything.

If you're making it up, make it up good. And then believe in what you made up.

I believe there is no part of our lives, our adult as well as child life, when we're not fantasizing, but we prefer to relegate fantasy to children, as though it were some tomfoolery only fit for the immature minds of the young. Children do live in fantasy and reality; they move back and forth very easily in a way we no longer remember how to do.

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.

An illustrator in my own mind - and this is not a truth of any kind - is someone who so falls in love with writing that he wishes he had written it, and the closest he can get to is illustrating it. And the next thing you learn, you have to find something unique in this book, which perhaps even the author was not entirely aware of. And that's what you hold on to, and that's what you add to the pictures: a whole Other Story that you believe in, that you think is there.

I don't want to lose hope.

Kids tell you what they think, not what they think they should think.

And [he] sailed back over a year and in and out of weeks and through a day and into the night of his very own room where he found his supper waiting for him and it was still hot

Children are the best living audience in the world because they are so thoroughly honest.

there is no such thing as fantasy unrelated to reality

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.

Kids books Grownup books That's just marketing. Books are books.

We're supposed to be civilized. We're supposed to go to work every day. We're supposed to be nice to our friends and send Christmas cards to our parents.

We're animals. We're violent. We're criminal. And if I've done anything, I've had kids express themselves as they are.

I was a very sickly child. My parents were immigrants. They were not decorous. They were not discreet. They always thought I was gonna die.

You can start making up any kind of story if you want to.

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.

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.

If I have an unusual gift, it's not that I draw particularly better than other people - I've never fooled myself about that. Rather it's that I remember things other people don't recall: the sounds and feelings and images - the emotional quality - of particular moments in childhood. Happily an essential part of myself - my dreaming life - still lives in the light of childhood.

God, I had great people in my life.

I want to see me to the end working, living for myself. Ripeness is all.

How do you write for children? I really have never figured that out. So I decided to just ignore it