Maurice Sendak Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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"And now," cried Max, "let the wild rumpus start!"

Maurice Sendak
Please don't go. We'll eat you up. We love you so.

Maurice Sendak
There must be more to life than having everything!

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

Maurice Sendak
I refuse to lie to children. I refuse to cater to the bullshit of innocence.

Maurice Sendak
Max was a little beast, and we're all little beasts. That was what was so novel.

Maurice Sendak
He died a happy death. It can be done. If you're William Blake and totally crazy.

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

Maurice Sendak
A book is really like a lover. It arranges itself in your life in a way that is beautiful.

Maurice Sendak
Children who fight back, children who are full of excitement are the kind of children I like.

Maurice Sendak
I can't believe I've turned into a typical old man. I can't believe it. I was young just minutes ago.

Maurice Sendak
And Max, the king of all Wild Things, was lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all.

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

Maurice Sendak
I stress character, character, character. And for authors to go where you want; go where you will. Children will go everywhere.

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

Maurice Sendak
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?

Maurice Sendak
I'm gay. I just didn't think it was anybody's business … All I wanted was to be straight so my parents could be happy. They never, never, never knew.

Maurice Sendak
We all did the most outlandish things, some of which we told our parents, most of which we did not. We were all keenly aware that parents were scaredy cats.

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
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.

Maurice Sendak
What is a children's-book artist? A moron! Some ugly fat pip-squick of a person who can't be bothered to grow up. That's the way we're treated in the adult world of publishing.

Maurice Sendak
There's a certain passivity, a going back to childhood innocence that I never quite believed in. We remembered childhood as a very passionate, upsetting, silly, comic business.

Maurice Sendak
I was developing a child who I recognized as myself as a child, from my observations of other children around me in Brooklyn. We were wild creatures. We did things that were objectionable.

Maurice Sendak