Maurice Sendak - Work Quotes

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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.

Maurice Sendak
You can't get rid of evil. We can't, and I feel that so intensely. All the idiots that keep coming into the world and wrecking people's lives.
And it is such an abundance of idiocy that you lose courage, okay? 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. But, I'm losing hope.

Maurice Sendak
Maybe there are lots of children or certainly those who are not drawn to my work because they don't want to see those shadows. But, I'm telling what it was like for me. And I know it was not unique for me.
I've known many children, many unhappy and many disturbed children who don't know how to talk about it. And you know, the strangest thing... 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
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 then, 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 supposed to do all these things which trouble us deeply because it's so against what we naturally would want to do. And if I've done anything, I've had kids express themselves as they are, impolitely, lovingly — they don't mean any harm. They just don't know what the right way is.
And as it turns out sometimes the so-called "right way" is utterly the wrong way. What a monstrous confusion.

Maurice Sendak
With books today, I'm not always sure if they're truthful or faithful to what's going on with children. If you look at the work of Tomi Ungerer, it's passionate, it's personal, it's marvelous and it's cuckoo, and it's that's kind of veracity that's always made for good children's literature.

Maurice Sendak
It's spontaneous combustion. I don't know what's going to work until I start to draw. It is so out of your hands it is amazing.

Maurice Sendak
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.

Maurice Sendak