318 Quotes by Maurice Sendak

"Then from far away across the world he smelled good things to eat, so he gave up being king of the wild things."

"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."

"When I did 'Bumble-ardy,' I was so intensely aware of death. Eugene, my friend and partner, was dying here in the house when I did 'Bumble-ardy'. I did 'Bumble-ardy' to save myself. I did not want to die with him. I wanted to live, as any human being does."

"There's something in this country that is so opposed to understanding the complexity of children."

"there is no such thing as fantasy unrelated to reality"

"To be a healthy person, you have to be sympathetic to the child you once were and maintain the continuity between you as a child and you as an adult."

"Oh, I adored Mickey Mouse when I was a child. He was the emblem of happiness and funniness. You went to the movies then, you saw two movies and a short. When Mickey Mouse came on the screen and there was his big head, my sister said she had to hold onto me. I went berserk."

"In another project I worked on just a few years ago, a staging of Peter and the Wolf, which I translated into Yiddish and sang on a stage in New York City. Thank God very few people knew I was doing it! But the kids in the audience loved it - even though it was all in Yiddish."

"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."

"I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can't stop them. They leave me and I love them more."