318 Quotes by Maurice Sendak

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.

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

We’re animals. We’re violent.

Where the Wild Things Are was not meant to please everybody – only children. A letter from a seven-year-old boy encourages me to think that I have reached children as I had hoped. He wrote: ‘How much does it cost to get to where the wild things are? If it is not expensive my sister and I want to spend the summer there. Please answer soon.’ I did not answer that question, for I have no doubt that sooner or later they will find their way, free of charge.

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.

You cannot write for children They’re much too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them.

You don’t want to do something that’s all terrifying.

That’s what art is. You don’t make up stories. You live your life.

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.