And the wild things roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws. - Maurice Sendak

And the wild things...gnashed their terrible teeth ...

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?

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.

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.