Top 120 Maurice Sendak Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “There’s a mystery there, a clue, a nut, a bolt, and if I put it together, I find me.”

— Maurice Sendak

52. “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

53. “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

54. “Because love is so enormous, the only thing you can think of doing is swallowing the person that you love entirely.”

— Maurice Sendak

55. “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

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

— Maurice Sendak

57. “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

58. “Parents shouldn’t assume children are made out of sugar candy and will break and collapse instantly. Kids don’t. We do.”

— Maurice Sendak

59. “I said anything I wanted because I don’t believe in children I don’t believe in childhood. I don’t believe that there’s a demarcation. ‘Oh you mustn’t tell them that. You mustn’t tell them that.’ You tell them anything you want. Just tell them if it’s true. If it’s true you tell them.”

— Maurice Sendak

60. “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

61. “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

62. “I’m getting old. And I’m disappointed in everything just the way old people traditionally, boringly are. That bothers me because is it too traditional? Am I not fighting hard enough? I don’t feel the fight. I don’t feel it.”

— Maurice Sendak

63. “I am in love with the world.”

— Maurice Sendak

64. “I have this idiot name tag which says ‘controversial.’”

— Maurice Sendak

65. “Kids lead a very private life.”

— Maurice Sendak

66. “My life in Brooklyn was in constant danger because of my bad health.”

— Maurice Sendak

67. “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

68. “I know that if there’s a purpose for life, it was for me to hear Mozart.”

— Maurice Sendak

69. “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

70. “One of the beauties of being an artist is that you can create a whole new world, with circumstances that are better in your invented world than they are in the real world.”

— Maurice Sendak

71. “I never set out to write books for children. I don’t have a feeling that I’m gonna save children or my life is devoted.”

— Maurice Sendak

72. “My father belonged to a Jewish social club.”

— Maurice Sendak

73. “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

74. “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

75. “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

76. “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

77. “And it’s one of the sexiest things you will ever read of how slow you should take the peach. Don’t rush it.”

— Maurice Sendak

78. “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

79. “I adored Mickey Mouse when I was a child. He was the emblem of happiness and funniness.”

— Maurice Sendak

80. “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

81. “I’m not jaded. I never have been jaded. I’ve always been surprised at my success. I’ve always enjoyed it.”

— Maurice Sendak

82. “Childhood is a tricky business. Usually, something goes wrong.”

— Maurice Sendak

83. “And the wild things... gnashed their terrible teeth...”

— Maurice Sendak

84. “Childhood is cannibals and psychotics vomiting in your mouth!”

— Maurice Sendak

85. “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

86. “If children are different from us, they are more spontaneous. Grown-up lives have become overlaid with dross.”

— Maurice Sendak

87. “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

88. “Children are the best living audience in the world because they are so thoroughly honest.”

— Maurice Sendak

89. “Grown-ups desperately need to feel safe, and then they project onto the kids. But what none of us seem to realize is how smart kids are. They don’t like what we write for them, what we dish up for them, because it’s vapid, so they’ll go for the hard words, they’ll go for the hard concepts, they’ll go for the stuff where they can learn something. Not didactic things, but passionate things.”

— Maurice Sendak

90. “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.”

— Maurice Sendak

91. “I’m scared of watching a TV show about vampires. I can’t fall asleep.”

— Maurice Sendak

92. “I remember how much – when I was a small boy I was taken to see a version of ‘Peter Pan.’ I detested it. I mean, the sentimental idea that anybody would want to remain a boy.”

— Maurice Sendak

93. “It is sometimes hard to be a family.”

— Maurice Sendak

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

— Maurice Sendak

95. “There are certain pieces of music that are always attached to certain books.”

— Maurice Sendak

96. “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

97. “I’m gay. I just didn’t think it was anybody’s business.”

— Maurice Sendak

98. “I became a set designer for opera.”

— Maurice Sendak

99. “I would infinitely prefer a daughter.”

— Maurice Sendak

100. “My father could be very witty, even if the humor was always on the darker side of irony.”

— Maurice Sendak