Maurice Sendak
Maurice Sendak
Maurice Bernard Sendakwas an American illustrator and writer of children's books. He became widely known for his book Where the Wild Things Are, first published in 1963. Born to Jewish-Polish parents, his childhood was affected by the death of many of his family members during the Holocaust. Besides Where the Wild Things Are, Sendak also wrote works such as In the Night Kitchen, Outside Over There, and illustrated many works by other authors including the Little Bear books by Else...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionChildren's Author
Date of Birth10 June 1928
CityBrooklyn, NY
CountryUnited States of America
We're animals. We're violent. We're criminal. And if I've done anything, I've had kids express themselves as they are.
We're animals. We're violent.
We're animals. We're violent. We're criminal. We're not so far away from the gorillas and the apes, those beautiful creatures.
Art has always been my salvation. And my gods are Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Mozart. I believe in them with all my heart. And 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. Or if I walk in the woods and I see an animal, the purpose of my life was to see that animal. I can recollect it, I can notice it. I’m here to take note of. And that is beyond my ego, beyond anything that belongs to me, an observer, an observer.
Things come to you without you necessarily knowing what they mean.
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?
The world is twice as crazy as it's ever been.
We're supposed to do all these things which trouble us deeply because it's so against what we naturally would want to do.
Do parents sit down and tell their kids everything? I don't know. I don't know.
Yes, there have to be places for safe wonderful stories.
I've convinced myself - I hope I'm right - that children despair of you if you don't tell them the truth.
People from New York have been calling, to see if I'm still alive. When I answer the phone, you can hear the disappointment in their voice.
I don't have kids at all and I thank God that I never did.
I don't know what to make of it, exactly, but I am so for it, ... I am in love with it. If Spike and Dave do not do this movie, now, I would just as soon not see any version of it ever get made.