Maurice Sendak Quotes
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Girls are infinitely more complicated than boys and women more than men. And there's no doubt about that. We just don't like to think about it. Certainly the men don't like to think about it.
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I do not remember any proper children's books in my childhood. I was not exposed to them.
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If life is so critical, if Anne Frank could die, if my friend could die, children were as vulnerable as adults, and that gave me a secret purpose to my work, to make them live. Because I wanted to live. I wanted to grow up.
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It's no fun being lonely.
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I became a set designer for opera.
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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 something that didn't make a lot of sense. But now I'm not. I have nothing to worry about. It doesn't matter.
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I'm still as enamored and turned on by work as I was when I was young.
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I'm sick of 'Wild Things.'
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Grown-ups are afraid for children. It's not children who are afraid.
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As a kid, all I thought about was death.
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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.
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My being gay was something of not great interest to me.
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I've convinced myself - I hope I'm right - that children despair of you if you don't tell them the truth.
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In plain terms, a child is a complicated creature who can drive you crazy. There's a cruelty to childhood, there's an anger.
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Kids are so shrewd.
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I hate people.
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My parents were ignorant peasants from the Old World.
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I mean, being a child was being a child, was being a creature without power, without pocket money, without escape routes of any kind. So I didn't want to be a child.
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I don't write for children. I write and someone says it's for children.
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My therapies went on forever.
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Finding out that I was gay when I was older was a shock and a disappointment.
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That always seemed to be the most critical test that a child was confronted with - loss of parents, loss of direction, loss of love. Can you live without a mother and a father?
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Kids lead a very private life.
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I have to accept my role. I will never kill myself like Vincent Van Gogh. Nor will I paint beautiful water lilies like Monet. I can't do that. I'm in the idiot role of being a kiddie book person.