Quotes from Maurice Sendak

I'm not Hans Christian Anderson. Nobody's gonna make a statue in the park with a lot of scrambling kids climbing up me. I won't have it, okay?

I'm not obsessed with angels but I do adore angels.

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.

Knowledge is the driving force that puts creative passion to work.

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.

All I wanted was to be straight so my parents could be happy. They never, never, never knew.

All I wanted was to be straight so my parents could be happy.

I became a set designer for opera.

There's something in this country that is so opposed to understanding the complexity of children.

Art has always been my salvation.

I'm scared of watching a TV show about vampires. I can't fall asleep.

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.

It is such an abundance of idiocy that you lose courage. That you lose hope. I don't want to lose hope. I get through every day. I'm pretty good. I work. I sleep. I sing. I walk.

We're supposed to be civilized. We're supposed to go to work every day. We're supposed to be nice to our friends and send Christmas cards to our parents.

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.

William Blake really is important, my cornerstone. Nobody ever told me before he did that childhood was such a damned serious business.

I'm still as enamored and turned on by work as I was when I was young.

Newt Gingrich is an idiot of great renown... There's something so hopelessly gross and vile about him it's hard to take him seriously.

We're animals. We're violent. We're criminal.

I'd like to believe an accumulation of experience has made me a sort of a grown-up person, so I can have judgment and taste and whatever.

Venturing back further, learning is so slow. Accomplishment is so slow. Experiencing and evaluating your experience is so slow.

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

Children do live in fantasy and reality; they move back and forth very easily in a way we no longer remember how to do.

there is no such thing as fantasy unrelated to reality