Maurice Sendak: Trending quotes (page 3)

“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

Source: Caldecott and Co.: Notes on Books and Pictures

Imagination

“I'll eat you up!”

Maurice Sendak book Where the Wild Things Are

Variant: I'll eat you up I love you so.
Source: Where the Wild Things Are

“When you hide another story in a story, that’s the story I am telling the children.”

Maurice Sendak

Quoted in an interview, "Sendak on Sendak," Rosenbach Museum & Library, Philadelphia (2007/2008)

Children

“I don't believe in things literally for children. That's a reduction.”

Maurice Sendak

As quoted in "Sendak Is Forming Company for National Children's Theater" by Eleanor Blau, in The New York Times (25 October 1990) http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE0D61F3DF936A15753C1A966958260&scp=1&sq=Sendak+reduction&st=nyt

Children

“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

NOW interview (2004)

“I certainly don't spell it out. But they have to know it's possible things are bad. But, they are surrounded by people who love them and will protect them but cannot hide the fact that there is something bad.”

Maurice Sendak

NOW interview (2004)

Love , People

“I’m gay. I just didn’t think it was anybody’s business … All I wanted was to be straight so my parents could be happy. They never, never, never knew.”

Maurice Sendak

As quoted in "Concerns Beyond Just Where the Wild Things Are" by Patricia Cohen in The New York Times (9 September 2008)

Business , Thinking , Parent , Happiness

“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

NOW interview (2004)

Hate , Hurt , Cooking

“We were the "chosen people," chosen to be killed?”

Maurice Sendak

On traditional Jewish faith, as quoted in "Concerns Beyond Just Where the Wild Things Are" by Patricia Cohen in The New York Times (9 September 2008) http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/10/arts/design/10sendak.html?pagewanted=all

People

“An illustrator in my own mind — and this is not a truth of any kind — is someone who so falls in love with writing that he wishes he had written it, and the closest he can get to is illustrating it. And the next thing you learn, you have to find something unique in this book, which perhaps even the author was not entirely aware of. And that’s what you hold on to, and that’s what you add to the pictures: a whole Other Story that you believe in, that you think is there.”

Maurice Sendak

Quoted in an interview, "Sendak on Sendak," Rosenbach Museum & Library, Philadelphia (2007/2008)

Love , Truth , Books , Thinking

“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 the splendid grace. And I think that is what’s happening to me.”

Maurice Sendak

As quoted in "Interview: Why Is Maurice Sendak So Incredibly Angry?" by Leonard S. Marcus in Parenting (October 1993); also in Ways of Telling : Conversations on the Art of the Picture Book (2002) by Leonard S. Marcus, p. 181

God , Thinking

“The blackbirds are in this book, they're both pro the kids and against the kids. Just like fate. Sometimes it goes your way. Sometimes… and also a blackbird is from my passion for Schubert songs and his blackbirds and his birds of doom or birds of good. … some people were baffled that in the last big picture of that book, there's a crucifix on the wall of the children's house. Everybody assumes the hero and heroine are Jewish and the mother is Jewish. They're not. They're not. — That was my point. Those kids were in the wrong place at the wrong time. And all children were in the Holocaust. Everybody was in the Holocaust. So, I made sure my hero and heroine were not Jewish children. That was too easy. That was too easy.”

Maurice Sendak

NOW interview (2004)

Fate , Children , People , Books

“Hitler made a film about "Hitler gives a camp to the Jews". And they look all shiny. And they're drawing. And they're playing volleyball. And people are dancing. And people are having a wonderful time. And everybody fell for it.”

Maurice Sendak

NOW interview (2004)

People , Time , Dance , Drawing