Quotes from Maurice Sendak

Childhood is cannibals and psychotics vomiting in your mouth!

A book is really like a lover. It arranges itself in your life in a way that is beautiful. Even as a kid, my sister, who was the eldest, brought books home for me, and I think I spent more time sniffing and touching them than reading. I just remember the joy of the book, the beauty of the binding. The smelling of the interior. Happy. [Interview with Emma Brockes, The Believer , November/December, 2012]

Sendak is in search of what he calls a yummy death. William Blake set the standard, jumping up from his death bed at the last minute to start singing. A happy death, says Sendak. It can be done. He lifts his eyebrows to two peaks. If you're William Blake and totally crazy.

He's just a boy, pretending to be a wolf, pretending to be king

I'll eat you up!

If there's anything I'm proud of in my work--it's not that I draw better; there's so many better graphic artists than me--or that I write better, no. It's--and I'm not saying I know the truth, because what the hell is that? But what I got from Ruth and Dave, a kind of fierce honesty, to not let the kid down, to not let the kid get punished, to not suffer the child to be dealt with in a boring, simpering, crushing-of-the-spirit kind of way.

Each month is gay, Each season nice, When eating Chicken soup With rice

There's so much more to a book than just the reading.

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.

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

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)

An illustration is an enlargement, and interpretation of the text, so that the reader will comprehend the words better. As an artist, you are always serving the words. You must never illustrate exactly what is written. You must find a space in the text so that the pictures can do the work. Then you must let the words take over where words do it best. It's a funny kind of juggling act.

They leave me and I love them more.

There are] games children must conjure up to combat an awful fact of childhood: the fact of their vulnerability to fear, anger, hate and frustration - all the emotions that are an ordinary part of their lives and that they can perceive only as as ungovernable and dangerous forces. To master these forces, children turn to fantasy: that imagined world where disturbing emotional situations are solved to their satisfaction.

Childhood is a tricky business. Usually something goes wrong.

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

I was sickly as a child and gravitated to books and drawing. During my early teen years, I spent hundreds of hours at my window, sketching neighborhood children at play. I sketched and listened, and those notebooks became the fertile field of my work later on. There is not a book I have written or a picture I have drawn that does not, in some way, owe them its existence.

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.

Oh, please don't go — I'll eat you up — I love you so!

Emeralds,' said the rabbit. 'Emeralds make a lovely gift.

May I ask what you have in your black leather bag with gold buckles? Everything. They were climbing a narrow staircase. Rhoda stopped to look when Jennie opened her bag. You do have everything. I have even more, Jennie said modestly. Two windows that I left at home.

Never fear. When this rose blooms, you will be with me again.

There's so much more to book than just reading

I am in love with the world.