Top 120 Maurice Sendak Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “You don’t want to do something that’s all terrifying.”

— Maurice Sendak

102. “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

103. “Mothers and children are human beings, and they will sometimes do the wrong thing.”

— Maurice Sendak

104. “Make it dangerous or it’s not worth doing.”

— Maurice Sendak

105. “I don’t know how to write a children’s book.”

— Maurice Sendak

106. “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

107. “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

108. “A book is really like a lover. It arranges itself in your life in a way that is beautiful.”

— Maurice Sendak

109. “You can’t get rid of evil. We can’t, and I feel that so intensely.”

— Maurice Sendak

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

— Maurice Sendak

111. “If you’re making it up, make it up good. And then believe in what you made up.”

— Maurice Sendak

112. “How do you write for children? I really have never figured that out. So I decided to just ignore it.”

— Maurice Sendak

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

— Maurice Sendak

114. “Dreams raise the emotional level of what I’m doing at the moment.”

— Maurice Sendak

115. “Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters – sometimes very hastily – but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, “Dear Jim: I loved your card.” Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.” That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.”

— Maurice Sendak

116. “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

117. “If there’s anything I’m proud of in my work – it’s not that I draw better; there’s so many better graphic artists than me – or that I write better, no. It’s – and I’m not saying I know the truth, because what the hell is that? But what I got from Ruth and Dave, a kind of fierce honesty, to not let the kid down, to not let the kid get punished, to not suffer the child to be dealt with in a boring, simpering, crushing-of-the-spirit kind of way.”

— Maurice Sendak

118. “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

119. “We’re animals. We’re violent.”

— Maurice Sendak

120. “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

121. “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

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

— Maurice Sendak

123. “I wanted my wild things to be frightening.”

— Maurice Sendak

124. “I’ll eat you up!”

— Maurice Sendak

125. “I think people should be given a test much like driver’s tests as to whether they’re capable of being parents!”

— Maurice Sendak

126. “I do not remember any proper children’s books in my childhood. I was not exposed to them.”

— Maurice Sendak

127. “I grew up in a house that was in a constant state of mourning.”

— Maurice Sendak

128. “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

129. “I really don’t like the city anymore. You get pushed and harassed and people grope you. It’s too tumultuous. It’s too crazy.”

— Maurice Sendak

130. “Max stepped into his private boat and waved goodbye and 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

131. “There’s something in this country that is so opposed to understanding the complexity of children.”

— Maurice Sendak

132. “I wanted to be acknowledged as an artist, not just some kiddie-book artist.”

— Maurice Sendak

133. “I am finding out as I am aging that I am in love with the world.”

— Maurice Sendak

134. “I am not a religious person, nor do I have any regrets. The war took care of the for me.”

— Maurice Sendak