318 Quotes by Maurice Sendak
"F**k them is what I say. I hate those ebooks. They can not be the future. They may well be. I will be dead. I won't give a s**t."
"I think it is unnatural to think that there is such a thing as a blue-sky, white-clouded happy childhood for anybody. Childhood is a very, very tricky business of surviving it. Because if one thing goes wrong or anything goes wrong, and usually something goes wrong, then you are compromised as a human being. You're going to trip over that for a good part of your life."
"He’s just a boy, pretending to be a wolf, pretending to be king"
"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. (In conversation with Art Spiegelman, The New Yorker, September 27, 1993)"
"You cannot write for children. They're much too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them."
"But the wild things cried, “Oh please don’t go - we’ll eat you up - we love you so!”And Max said, “No!”The wild things roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws but Max stepped into his private boat and waved goodbye."
"It's only adults who read the top layers most of the time. I think children read the internal meanings of everything."
"I refuse to lie to children. I refuse to cater to the bullshit of innocence."
"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."