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Maurice Sendak Quotes | Quotes said by Maurice Sendak

  • Maurice Sendak Quote #1

    . . .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 Quote #2

    [There are] games children must conjure up to combat an awful fact of childhood: the fact of their vulnerability to fear, anger, hate and frustration - all the emotions that are an ordinary part of their lives and that they can perceive only as as ungovernable and dangerous forces. To master these forces, children turn to fantasy: that imagined world where disturbing emotional situations are solved to their satisfaction.

  • Maurice Sendak Quote #3

    And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming wild things.

  • Maurice Sendak Quote #4

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

  • Maurice Sendak Quote #5

    But the wild things cried, “Oh please don’t go - we’ll eat you up - we love you so!”
    And Max said, “No!”
    The wild things roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws but Max stepped into his private boat and waved goodbye.

  • Maurice Sendak Quote #6

    Childhood is a tricky business. Usually, something goes wrong.

  • Maurice Sendak Quote #7

    Childhood is cannibals and psychotics vomiting in your mouth!

  • Maurice Sendak Quote #8

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

  • Maurice Sendak Quote #9

    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.

  • Maurice Sendak Quote #10

    I adored Mickey Mouse when I was a child. He was the emblem of happiness and funniness.

  • Maurice Sendak Quote #11

    I have nothing now but praise for my life. I'm not unhappy. 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 Quote #12

    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

  • Maurice Sendak Quote #13

    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. (In conversation with Art Spiegelman, The New Yorker, September 27, 1993)

  • Maurice Sendak Quote #14

    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.

  • Maurice Sendak Quote #15

    I want to be alone and work until the day my heads hits the drawing table and I'm dead. Kaput. I feel very much like I want to be with my brother and sister again. They're nowhere. I know they're nowhere and they don't exist, but if nowhere means that's where they are, that's where I want to be.

  • Maurice Sendak Quote #16

    In plain terms, a child is a complicated creature who can drive you crazy. There's a cruelty to childhood, there's an anger.

  • Maurice Sendak Quote #17

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

  • Maurice Sendak Quote #18

    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 Quote #19

    Mothers and children are human beings, and they will sometimes do the wrong thing.

  • Maurice Sendak Quote #20

    My father could be very witty, even if the humor was always on the darker side of irony.

  • Maurice Sendak Quote #21

    My life in Brooklyn was in constant danger because of my bad health.

  • Maurice Sendak Quote #22

    Oh, I adored Mickey Mouse when I was a child. He was the emblem of happiness and funniness. You went to the movies then, you saw two movies and a short. When Mickey Mouse came on the screen and there was his big head, my sister said she had to hold onto me. I went berserk.

  • Maurice Sendak Quote #23

    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.

  • Maurice Sendak Quote #24

    so that it isn't upsetting to anybody. It's something we've always known about fairy tales – they talk about incest, the Oedipus complex, about psychotic mothers, like those of Snow White and Hansel and Gretel, who throw their children out. They tell things about life which children know instinctively, and the pleasure and relief lie in finding these things expressed in language that children can live with. You can't eradicate these feelings – they exist and they're a great source of creative inspiration.

  • Maurice Sendak Quote #25

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

  • Maurice Sendak Quote #26

    The distinctions of fine art bore me to death.

  • Maurice Sendak Quote #27

    To get a child's trust - you may know or not - is a very hard thing to do. They're so used to not believing adults - because adults tell tales and lies all the time.

  • Maurice Sendak Quote #28

    What I do as best I can is out of a deep respect for children, for how difficult their world is.

  • Maurice Sendak Quote #29

    When I did 'Bumble-ardy,' I was so intensely aware of death. Eugene, my friend and partner, was dying here in the house when I did 'Bumble-ardy'. I did 'Bumble-ardy' to save myself. I did not want to die with him. I wanted to live, as any human being does.

  • Maurice Sendak Quote #30

    You cannot write for children. They're much too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them.

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