110+ Maurice Sendak Quotes On Education, Art And Blank

Maurice Sendak was an American artist and writer of children's books. He is best known for his book 'Where the Wild Things Are', which was published in 1963. He wrote and illustrated over 20 books and was awarded the Caldecott Medal for his book 'Outside Over There' in 1981. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Maurice Sendak on education, love, art.

Top 10 Maurice Sendak Quotes

1. There must be more to life than having everything.
2. 'Hansel and Gretel' is one of the scariest stories ever written! Psychotic mother; stupid, inane father.
3. And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming Wild Things.
4. And the walls became the world all around.
5. I know that if there’s a purpose for life, it was for me to hear Mozart.
6. Children do live in fantasy and reality; they move back and forth very easily in a way we no longer remember how to do.
7. A book is really like a lover. It arranges itself in your life in a way that is beautiful.
8. 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.
9. And now," cried Max, "let the wild rumpus start!
10. Sipping once, sipping twice, sipping chicken soup with rice.

Maurice Sendak Short Quotes

• Each month is gay, Each season nice, When eating Chicken soup With rice
• There should be a place where only the things you want to happen, happen.
• Knowledge is the driving force that puts creative passion to work.
• I don't believe in an afterlife but I still fully expect to see my brother again.
• I hate those e-books. They can not be the future... they may well be... I will be dead.
• I want to see me to the end working, living for myself. Ripeness is all.
• You can start making up any kind of story if you want to.
• What is the point of it all? Not leaving legacies. But being ripe. Being ripe.
• We all want to be renewed, don't we?
• My brother, who was older, was the gifted one, much more talented than I.

Maurice Sendak Quotes About Love

And Max, the king of all wild things, was lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all. — Maurice Sendak

I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can't stop them. They leave me and I love them more. — Maurice Sendak

I've always loved pigs: the shape of them, the look of them, and the fact that they are so intelligent. — Maurice Sendak

Oh, please don't go — we'll eat you up — we love you so! — Maurice Sendak

Emeralds,' said the rabbit. 'Emeralds make a lovely gift. — Maurice Sendak

Because love is so enormous, the only thing you can think of doing is swallowing the person that you love entirely. — Maurice Sendak

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? — Maurice Sendak

In another project I worked on just a few years ago, a staging of Peter and the Wolf, which I translated into Yiddish and sang on a stage in New York City. Thank God very few people knew I was doing it! But the kids in the audience loved it - even though it was all in Yiddish. — Maurice Sendak

I became a set designer for opera. I'm a great opera buff, I love classical music, and I needed a time-out. — Maurice Sendak

Maurice Sendak Quotes About Art

I think people should be given a test much like driver's tests as to whether they're capable of being parents! It's an art form. I talk a lot. And I think a lot. And I draw a lot. But never in a million years would I have been a parent. That's just work that's too hard. — Maurice Sendak

Art has always been my salvation. — Maurice Sendak

Truthfullness to life-both fantasy life and factual life-is the basis of all great art. — Maurice Sendak

That's what art is. You don't make up stories. You live your life. — Maurice Sendak

Maurice Sendak Quotes About Death

As a kid, all I thought about was death. But you can't tell your parents that. — Maurice Sendak

My big concern is me and what do I do now until the time of my death. That is valid. That is useful. That is beautiful. That is creative. — Maurice Sendak

When I did 'Bumble-ardy,' I was so intensely aware of death. Eugene, my friend and partner, was dying here in the house when I did 'Bumble-ardy'. I did 'Bumble-ardy' to save myself. I did not want to die with him. I wanted to live, as any human being does. — Maurice Sendak

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. — Maurice Sendak

Maurice Sendak Quotes About God

You know who my gods are, who I believe in fervently? Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson - she's probably the top - Mozart, Shakespeare, Keats. These are wonderful gods who have gotten me through the narrow straits of life. — Maurice Sendak

I know there are supposedly happy people in this world. I never believed it, but I take it for granted. God knows, they're all on television. — Maurice Sendak

God, I had great people in my life. — Maurice Sendak

Thank God that Bumble-Ardy's parents are dead so we don't have to wonder what they did to him. We only know that they were famous, and famous people have unhappy children for the most part. They don't have the time to take care of them. So he's a troubled pig-boy, a kid you've got to watch. — Maurice Sendak

Maurice Sendak Quotes About Imaginative

I have been doodling with ink and watercolor on paper all my life. It's my way of stirring up my imagination to see what I find hidden in my head. I call the results dream pictures, fantasy sketches, and even brain-sharpenin g exercises. — Maurice Sendak

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. — Maurice Sendak

As an aspiring artist, you should strive for originality of vision. Have something to say and a fresh way of saying it. No story is worth the writing, no picture worth the making, if it’s not the work of the imagination. — Maurice Sendak

Maurice Sendak Quotes About Children

We’ve educated children to think that spontaneity is inappropriate. Children are willing to expose themselves to experiences. We aren’t. Grownups always say they protect their children, but they’re really protecting themselves. Besides, you can’t protect children. They know everything. — Maurice Sendak

You cannot write for children They're much too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them. — Maurice Sendak

Mothers and children are human beings, and they will sometimes do the wrong thing. — Maurice Sendak

I refuse to lie to children. — Maurice Sendak

Parents shouldn't assume children are made out of sugar candy and will break and collapse instantly. Kids don't. We do. — Maurice Sendak

If children are different from us, they are more spontaneous. Grown-up lives have become overlaid with dross. — Maurice Sendak

I adored Mickey Mouse when I was a child. He was the emblem of happiness and funniness. — Maurice Sendak

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

We've educated children to think spontaneity is inappropriate. — Maurice Sendak

I never thought of Bumble-Ardy in that way. But I still have that same deep feeling for children who are in dire trouble. I see Bumble-Ardy as a lonely, unhappy kid who is doing the very best he can to be in the world, to have a party. — Maurice Sendak

Maurice Sendak Quotes About Parents

Most children - I know I did when I was a kid - fantasize another set of parents. Or fantasize no parents. They don't tell their real parents about that - you don't want to tell Mom and Dad. Kids lead a very private life. And I was a typical child, I think. I was a liar. — Maurice Sendak

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. — Maurice Sendak

I think people should be given a test much like driver's tests as to whether they're capable of being parents! — Maurice Sendak

I was a very sickly child. My parents were immigrants. They were not decorous. They were not discreet. They always thought I was gonna die. — Maurice Sendak

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

Kids never get pissed at their parents. Unheard of. — Maurice Sendak

Do parents sit down and tell their kids everything? I don't know. I don't know. I've convinced myself - I hope I'm right - that children despair of you if you don't tell them the truth. — Maurice Sendak

Maurice Sendak Quotes About Life

When Mozart is playing in my room, I am in conjunction with something I can't explain... I don't need to. I know that if there's a purpose for life, it was for me to hear Mozart. — Maurice Sendak

Life has only gotten better personally for me as I've gotten older. I mean, being young was such a gross waste of time. I was just such a miserable, miserable person. — Maurice Sendak

I never can satisfy some need in me to achieve something of incredible hight. For my sake. It puzzles me deeply. And it sours my life. So there is a permanent dissatisfaction. — Maurice Sendak

My life in Brooklyn was in constant danger because of my bad health. — Maurice Sendak

Kids lead a very private life. — Maurice Sendak

I wish you all good things. Live your life, live your life, live your life. — Maurice Sendak

It is a blessing to get old. It is a blessing to find the time to do the things, to read the books, to listen to the music. I have nothing now but praise for my life. — Maurice Sendak

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. — Maurice Sendak

As a child, I felt that books were holy objects, to be caressed, rapturously sniffed, and devotedly provided for. I gave my life to them. I still do. I continue to do what I did as a child; dream of books, make books and collect books. — Maurice Sendak

Children surviving childhood is my obsessive theme and my life's concern. — Maurice Sendak

Maurice Sendak Quotes About Child

To get a child's trust - you may know or not - is a very hard thing to do. They're so used to not believing adults - because adults tell tales and lies all the time. — Maurice Sendak

Oh, I adored Mickey Mouse when I was a child. He was the emblem of happiness and funniness. You went to the movies then, you saw two movies and a short. When Mickey Mouse came on the screen and there was his big head, my sister said she had to hold onto me. I went berserk. — Maurice Sendak

To be a healthy person, you have to be sympathetic to the child you once were and maintain the continuity between you as a child and you as an adult. — Maurice Sendak

In plain terms, a child is a complicated creature who can drive you crazy. There's a cruelty to childhood, there's an anger. — Maurice Sendak

Bumble-Ardy is a very wicked little child as far as I'm concerned. He's not to be trusted. — Maurice Sendak

It was inconceivable to me as a child that I would be an adult. I mean, one assumed that it would happen, but obviously it didn't happen, or if it did, it happened when your back was turned, and then suddenly you were there. So I couldn't have thought about it much. — Maurice Sendak

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. — Maurice Sendak

Maurice Sendak Quotes About Kids

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

I want to be free again. I want to be free like when I was a kid, working with my brother and making toy airplanes and a whole model of the World's Fair in 1939 out of wax. — Maurice Sendak

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? — Maurice Sendak

All I liked to do when I was a kid was draw. My childhood was like my adult life: drawing pictures with my brother, putting the comics up on the glass window, and tracing the characters onto tracing paper or drawing paper and then coloring them. That and making things was all we ever did. — Maurice Sendak

Kids tell you what they think, not what they think they should think. — Maurice Sendak

Kids books Grownup books That's just marketing. Books are books. — Maurice Sendak

All I liked to do when I was a kid was draw. — Maurice Sendak

I write books that seem more suitable for children, and that's OK with me. They are a better audience and tougher critics. Kids tell you what they think, not what they think they should think. — Maurice Sendak

We're animals. We're violent. We're criminal. And if I've done anything, I've had kids express themselves as they are. — Maurice Sendak

Maurice Sendak Famous Quotes And Sayings

From their earliest years children live on familiar terms with disrupting emotions, fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of their everyday lives, they continually cope with frustrations as best they can. And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming Wild Things. — Maurice Sendak

Illustrations have as much to say as the text. The trick is to say the same thing, but in a different way. It's no good being an illustrator who is saying a lot that is on his or her mind, if it has nothing to do with the text. . . the artist must override the story, but he must also override his own ego for the sake of the story. — Maurice Sendak

I did not know how to paint a mural. I did not know how to prepare the surface. There was nobody from the Renaissance around who could advise me, and I did the best I could. — Maurice Sendak

There are so many beautiful things in the world which I will have to leave when I die, but I'm ready, I'm ready, I'm ready. — Maurice Sendak

One of the few graces of getting old - and God knows there are few graces - is that if you've worked hard and kept your nose to the grindstone, something happens: The body gets old but the creative mechanism is refreshed, smoothed and oiled and honed. That is the grace. That is what's happening to me. — Maurice Sendak

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. — Maurice Sendak

Children are tough, though we tend to think of them as fragile. They have to be tough. Childhood is not easy. We sentimentalize children, but they know what's real and what's not. They understand metaphor and symbol. If children are different from us, they are more spontaneous. Grown-up lives have become overlaid with dross. — Maurice Sendak

A whole new world of Italian music was springing up, and [Giuseppe] Verdi was seen as old. Boito got Verdi all excited about the possibility of doing another opera, another kind of opera. In fact, Verdi composed his two best operas, Otello and Falstaff, in his eighties. — Maurice Sendak

It was a very difficult time. I was working on [umble-Ardy] when my partner and friend was dying of cancer. We set up a room in the house to be like a hospital room. Eugene died, and then I had bypass surgery. I was doing the book to stay sane while all this was going on. — Maurice Sendak

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

I believe there is no part of our lives, our adult as well as child life, when we're not fantasizing, but we prefer to relegate fantasy to children, as though it were some tomfoolery only fit for the immature minds of the young. Children do live in fantasy and reality; they move back and forth very easily in a way we no longer remember how to do. — Maurice Sendak

I often went to bed without supper cause I hated my mother's cooking. So, to go to bed without supper was not a torture to me. If she was gonna hurt me, she'd make me eat. — Maurice Sendak

Then from far away across the world he smelled good things to eat, so he gave up being king of the wild things. — Maurice Sendak

The magic of childhood is the strangeness of childhood — the uniqueness that makes us see things that other people don't see. — Maurice Sendak

And [he] sailed back over a year and in and out of weeks and through a day and into the night of his very own room where he found his supper waiting for him and it was still hot — Maurice Sendak

I never spent less than two years on the text of one of my picture books, even though each of them is approximately 380 words long. Only when the text is finished ... do I begin the pictures. — Maurice Sendak

Certainly we want to protect our children from new and painful experiences that are beyond their emotional comprehension and that intensify anxiety; and to a point we can prevent premature exposure to such experiences. — Maurice Sendak

I hate, loathe and despise schools.School is bad for you if you have any talent. You should be cultivating that talent in your own particular way. — Maurice Sendak

I can't believe I've turned into a typical old man. I can't believe it. I was young just minutes ago. — Maurice Sendak

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. — Maurice Sendak

I have a little tiny Emily Dickinson so big that I carry in my pocket everywhere. And you just read three poems of Emily. She is so brave. She is so strong. She is such a sexy, passionate, little woman. I feel better. — Maurice Sendak

Bumble-Ardy looks like a happy book. That's the funniest thing about it. But this was survival. I was working very hard to survive. — Maurice Sendak

Herman Melville said that artists have to take a dive and either you hit your head on a rock and you split your skull and you die … or that blow to the head is so inspiring that you come back and do the best work that you ever did. BUT you have to take the dive and you do not know what the results will be. — Maurice Sendak

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 — Maurice Sendak

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. — Maurice Sendak

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. — Maurice Sendak

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

I think that if in your heart, you are seeking out a real puzzle, and you're not looking to frighten anybody, you're not looking to upset anybody, and you're looking to discuss a subject that you yourself went through when you were nine - you just don't remember the difficulties of one's own childhood. — Maurice Sendak

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. — Maurice Sendak

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

I'm gay. I just didn't think it was anybody's business. — Maurice Sendak

Childhood is a tricky business. Usually, something goes wrong. — Maurice Sendak

I wanted to be acknowledged as an artist, not just some kiddie-book artist. — Maurice Sendak

I'm not jaded. I never have been jaded. I've always been surprised at my success. I've always enjoyed it. — Maurice Sendak

I refuse to cater to the bullshit of innocence. — Maurice Sendak

You don't want to do something that's all terrifying. — Maurice Sendak

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

You can't write masterpieces in your 80s and be happy too. — Maurice Sendak

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. — Maurice Sendak

I would infinitely prefer a daughter. — Maurice Sendak

I'm totally crazy, I know that. I don't say that to be a smartass, but I know that that's the very essence of what makes my work good. And I know my work is good. Not everybody likes it, that's fine. I don't do it for everybody. Or anybody. I do it because I can't not do it. — Maurice Sendak

It's no fun being lonely. — Maurice Sendak

there is no such thing as fantasy unrelated to reality — Maurice Sendak

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. — Maurice Sendak

I feel it in me like a woman having a baby, all that life churning inside me. I feel it every day; it moves, stretches, yawns. It's getting ready to be born. It knows exactly what it is. — Maurice Sendak

If there's any advice I have to give, I would say it's that. If you're looking for a way to get closer to your kids, there ain't no better way than to grab 'em and read. And if you put them in front of a computer or a TV, you are abandoning them. You are abandoning them because they are sitting on a couch or a floor and they may be hugging a dog, but they ain't hugging you. — Maurice Sendak

Why is my needle stuck in childhood? I don't know why. I guess it's because that's where my heart is. — Maurice Sendak

I had been reading a fabulous book [The Man Verdi, by Frank Walker] about [Giuseppe] Verdi, whom I adore. — Maurice Sendak

I don't want to lose hope. — Maurice Sendak

Life Lessons by Maurice Sendak

Maurice Sendak taught us to be brave and to be ourselves. He showed us that it's okay to be scared sometimes, but that we should never let fear stop us from doing what we want to do. His work encouraged us to be creative and to explore our imaginations.