Maurice Sendak Quotes

And he sailed off through night and day
And in and out of weeks
And almost over a year
To where the wild things are.

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.

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

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.

Too many people miss the silver lining because they're expecting gold.

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

An illustrator in my own mind — and this is not a truth of any kind — is someone who so falls in love with writing that he wishes he had written it, and the closest he can get to is illustrating it. And the next thing you learn, you have to find something unique in this book, which perhaps even the author was not entirely aware of. And that’s what you hold on to, and that’s what you add to the pictures: a whole Other Story that you believe in, that you think is there.

Kids don’t know about best sellers. They go for what they enjoy. They aren’t star chasers and they don’t suck up. It’s why I like them.

There is a standard theory about childhood that everybody works from, and critics check whether a picture book has followed the 'rules' about what is right for children, or what is healthy for children, or what we think is right and healthy for children. This comes into conflict all the time with those things that are mysterious. Children are much more catholic in taste; will tolerate ambiguities, peculiarities, and things illogical; will take them into their unconscious and deal with them as best they can.

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)

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

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

Let the wild rumpus start!

If I have an unusual gift, it’s not that I draw particularly better than other people — I’ve never fooled myself about that. Rather it’s that I remember things other people don’t recall: the sounds and feelings and images — the emotional quality — of particular moments in childhood. Happily an essential part of myself — my dreaming life — still lives in the light of childhood.

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