Top 239 Quotes & Sayings by Maurice Sendak - Page 4

And it's one of the sexiest things you will ever read of how slow you should take the peach. Don't rush it.

The magic of childhood is the strangeness of childhood — the uniqueness that makes us see things that other people don't see.

Each month is gay, Each season nice, When eating Chicken soup With rice

Girls are infinitely more complicated than boys, and women more than men.

There's a mystery there, a clue, a nut, a bolt, and if I put it together, I find me.

Art has always been my salvation.

If children are different from us, they are more spontaneous. Grown-up lives have become overlaid with dross.

Make it dangerous or it's not worth doing.

A book is really like a lover. It arranges itself in your life in a way that is beautiful. Even as a kid, my sister, who was the eldest, brought books home for me, and I think I spent more time sniffing and touching them than reading. I just remember the joy of the book, the beauty of the binding. The smelling of the interior. Happy.

It was inconceivable to me as a child that I would be an adult. I mean, one assumed that it would happen, but obviously it didn't happen, or if it did, it happened when your back was turned, and then suddenly you were there. So I couldn't have thought about it much.

William Blake really is important, my cornerstone. Nobody ever told me before he did that childhood was such a damned serious business.

I know there are supposedly happy people in this world. I never believed it, but I take it for granted. God knows, they're all on television.

I have been doodling with ink and watercolor on paper all my life. It's my way of stirring up my imagination to see what I find hidden in my head. I call the results dream pictures, fantasy sketches, and even brain-sharpenin g exercises.

I never spent less than two years on the text of one of my picture books, even though each of them is approximately 380 words long. Only when the text is finished ... do I begin the pictures.

My sister had her own room. She also had innumerable boyfriends. I had a yo-yo collection that was beyond belief, and the reason I had it was mostly that I would stand in the doorway of the living room watching her and her boyfriend. Finally she caught on how to get this kid out of the way. Give him a yo-yo!

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.

Dreams raise the emotional level of what I'm doing at the moment.

In another project I worked on just a few years ago, a staging of Peter and the Wolf, which I translated into Yiddish and sang on a stage in New York City. Thank God very few people knew I was doing it! But the kids in the audience loved it - even though it was all in Yiddish.

You can't get rid of evil. We can't, and I feel that so intensely.

We all want to be renewed, don't we?

Bumble-Ardy is a very wicked little child as far as I'm concerned. He's not to be trusted.

Then one day my sister abandoned me at the 1939 World's Fair, and that incident is the essence of In the Night Kitchen. I was standing there with hundreds of other people waving back at the little midgets dressed like bakers when I turned around and my sister was gone! The next thing I know I'm screaming and crying and policemen are taking me to a big place with tons of kids who had all been abandoned like me. At least I was old enough to give them a name and an address.

I often went to bed without supper cause I hated my mother's cooking. So, to go to bed without supper was not a torture to me. If she was gonna hurt me, she'd make me eat.

I said anything I wanted because I don't believe in children I don't believe in childhood. I don't believe that there's a demarcation. 'Oh you mustn't tell them that. You mustn't tell them that.' You tell them anything you want. Just tell them if it's true. If it's true you tell them.

Sendak is in search of what he calls a "yummy death". William Blake set the standard, jumping up from his death bed at the last minute to start singing. "A happy death," says Sendak. "It can be done." He lifts his eyebrows to two peaks. "If you're William Blake and totally crazy.

The day after Paul Newman was dead, he was twice as dead.

I don't know how to write a children's book.

My brother, who was older, was the gifted one, much more talented than I.

I feel it in me like a woman having a baby, all that life churning inside me. I feel it every day; it moves, stretches, yawns. It's getting ready to be born. It knows exactly what it is.

I'm gay. I just didn't think it was anybody's business.

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.

We're animals. We're violent.

Bumble-Ardy looks like a happy book. That's the funniest thing about it. But this was survival. I was working very hard to survive.

I had lost my sister recently, too, which meant that my whole family was gone. I was the baby of the family. There were five Sendaks and there were five Wild Things, and now there's only one Sendak, and he's about to bite the dust, too! Life, as I said before, was very difficult at that time and so it was natural that there would be a change in the look of things. Also, I was very impressed with my own strength in doing this under the circumstances in which I was living.

[Drawing] and making things was all we ever did. My brother and I built the entire New York World's Fair of 1939 in miniature out of wax. The floor of our room was covered with little waxen buildings. Nobody else could come in.

Sipping once, sipping twice, sipping chicken soup with rice.

I'm writing a poem right now about a nose. I've always wanted to write a poem about a nose. But it's a ludicrous subject. That's why, when I was younger, I was afraid of [writing] something that didn't make a lot of sense. But now I'm not. I have nothing to worry about. It doesn't matter.

I wanted my wild things to be frightening.

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.

I am not a religious person, nor do I have any regrets. The war took care of that for me. You know, I was brought up strictly kosher, but I - it made no sense to me. It made no sense to me what was happening. So nothing of it means anything to me. Nothing. Except these few little trivial things that are related to being Jewish. ... 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.

I don't believe in things literally for children. That's a reduction.

I know that if there’s a purpose for life, it was for me to hear Mozart.

Childhood is cannibals and psychotics vomiting in your mouth!

I never thought of Bumble-Ardy in that way. But I still have that same deep feeling for children who are in dire trouble. I see Bumble-Ardy as a lonely, unhappy kid who is doing the very best he can to be in the world, to have a party.

Kids never get pissed at their parents. Unheard of.

For my father the one calamity was that my brother and sister and I never learned to swim. My father, who was very macho, was a strong swimmer and was terribly disappointed to have children who didn't swim. Once when my mother was sitting in a beach chair - I can still see the big umbrella - she called to my father, "Throw them in! Throw them in! They'll swim!" So he did. Then he looked down, and there were the three Sendak children lying perfectly still underwater, not fighting for life!

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.

Illustrations have as much to say as the text. The trick is to say the same thing, but in a different way. It's no good being an illustrator who is saying a lot that is on his or her mind, if it has nothing to do with the text. . . the artist must override the story, but he must also override his own ego for the sake of the story.

I want to be free again. I want to be free like when I was a kid, working with my brother and making toy airplanes and a whole model of the World's Fair in 1939 out of wax.

I'm not jaded. I never have been jaded. I've always been surprised at my success. I've always enjoyed it.

I had been reading a fabulous book [The Man Verdi, by Frank Walker] about [Giuseppe] Verdi, whom I adore.

All I liked to do when I was a kid was draw. My childhood was like my adult life: drawing pictures with my brother, putting the comics up on the glass window, and tracing the characters onto tracing paper or drawing paper and then coloring them. That and making things was all we ever did.

Venturing back further, learning is so slow. Accomplishment is so slow. Experiencing and evaluating your experience is so slow.

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?

I think that if in your heart, you are seeking out a real puzzle, and you're not looking to frighten anybody, you're not looking to upset anybody, and you're looking to discuss a subject that you yourself went through when you were nine - you just don't remember the difficulties of one's own childhood.

My big concern is me and what do I do now until the time of my death. That is valid. That is useful. That is beautiful. That is creative.

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.

I thought that if I were going into old age I would want to do what [Giuseppe] Verdi did, which is to write extraordinary things, and to really find myself.

I really don't like the city anymore. You get pushed and harassed and people grope you. It's too tumultuous. It's too crazy.