Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Maurice Sendak, fully Maurice Bernard Sendak

American Writer and Illustrator of Children's Literature best known for Where the Wild Things are

"My work is not great, but it's respectable. I have no false illusions."

"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."

"Oh, please don't go ? we'll eat you up ? we love you so!"

"Newt Gingrich is an idiot of great renown... There's something so hopelessly gross and vile about him it's hard to take him seriously."

"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."

"One of the few graces of getting old ? and God knows there are few graces ? is that if you?ve worked hard and kept your nose to the grindstone, something happens: The body gets old but the creative mechanism is refreshed, smoothed and oiled and honed. That is the grace. That is the splendid grace. And I think that is what?s happening to me."

"Parents shouldn't assume children are made out of sugar candy and will break and collapse instantly. Kids don't. We do."

"People from New York have been calling, to see if I'm still alive. When I answer the phone, you can hear the disappointment in their voice."

"Please don't go. We'll eat you up. We love you so."

"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."

"Sipping once, sipping twice, sipping chicken soup with rice."

"So that it isn't upsetting to anybody. It's something we've always known about fairy tales ? they talk about incest, the Oedipus complex, about psychotic mothers, like those of Snow White and Hansel and Gretel, who throw their children out. They tell things about life which children know instinctively, and the pleasure and relief lie in finding these things expressed in language that children can live with. You can't eradicate these feelings ? they exist and they're a great source of creative inspiration."

"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?"

"The attitude towards children was: Keep them calm, keep them happy, keep them snug and safe. It's not a putdown of those earlier books. But basically, they went by the rules that children should be safe and that we adults should be their guardians. I got out of that, and I was considered outlandish. So be it."

"The ripeness was a letter that John Keats wrote to his brother who emigrated to America describing what it was like to have a peach or piece of a peach in his mouth. And it's one of the sexiest things you will ever read of how slow you should take the peach. Don't rush it. Let it go through your palette. Let it lie on your tongue. Let it melt a little bit. Let it run from the corners. It's like describing the most incredible sex orgy. And then, you bite. But, it must be so ripe. It must be so delicious. In other words, you must not waste a second of this deliciousness which for him was life and being a great poet. That you savor every, everything that happened. I want to get ripe."

"The day after Paul Newman was dead, he was twice as dead."

"The blackbirds are in this book, they're both pro the kids and against the kids. Just like fate. Sometimes it goes your way. Sometimes... and also a blackbird is from my passion for Schubert songs and his blackbirds and his birds of doom or birds of good. ? some people were baffled that in the last big picture of that book, there's a crucifix on the wall of the children's house. Everybody assumes the hero and heroine are Jewish and the mother is Jewish. They're not. They're not. ? That was my point. Those kids were in the wrong place at the wrong time. And all children were in the Holocaust. Everybody was in the Holocaust. So, I made sure my hero and heroine were not Jewish children. That was too easy. That was too easy."

"The distinctions of fine art bore me to death."

"The world is twice as crazy as it's ever been."

"The qualities that make for excellence in children's literature can be summed up in a single word: imagination. And imagination as it relates to the child is, to my mind, synonymous with fantasy. Contrary to most of the propaganda in books for the young, childhood is only partly a time of innocence. It is, in my opinion, a time of seriousness, bewilderment, and a good deal of suffering. It's also possibly the best of all times. Imagination for the child is the miraculous, freewheeling device he uses to course his way through the problems of every day....It's through fantasy that children achieve catharsis."

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

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

"There are certain pieces of music that are always attached to certain books."

"There are games children must conjure up to combat an awful fact of childhood: the fact of their vulnerability to fear, anger, hate and frustration - all the emotions that are an ordinary part of their lives and that they can perceive only as as ungovernable and dangerous forces. To master these forces, children turn to fantasy: that imagined world where disturbing emotional situations are solved to their satisfaction."

"There are so many beautiful things in the world which I will have to leave when I die, but I'm ready, I'm ready, I'm ready."

"There should be a place where only the things you want to happen, happen."

"There is no such thing as fantasy unrelated to reality."

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

"There's so much more to a book than just the reading."

"These Republican schnooks would be comical if they weren't not funny."

"There's a certain passivity, a going back to childhood innocence that I never quite believed in. We remembered childhood as a very passionate, upsetting, silly, comic business."

"They (children) have written to me. They trust me in a way, I daresay, possibly more than they trust their parents. I?m not going to bullshit them. I?m just not. And if they don?t like what they hear, that?s tough bananas."

"They leave me and I love them more."

"Things come to you without you necessarily knowing what they mean."

"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."

"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."

"We all did the most outlandish things, some of which we told our parents, most of which we did not. We were all keenly aware that parents were scaredy cats."

"We were the "chosen people," chosen to be killed?"

"We?ve educated children to think that spontaneity is inappropriate. Children are willing to expose themselves to experiences. We aren?t. Grownups always say they protect their children, but they?re really protecting themselves. Besides, you can?t protect children. They know everything."

"We're supposed to do all these things which trouble us deeply because it's so against what we naturally would want to do."

"We've educated children to think that spontaneity is inappropriate. Children are willing to expose themselves to experiences. We aren't. Grownups always say they protect their children, but they're really protecting themselves. Besides, you can't protect children. They know everything."

"We're animals. We're violent. We're criminal. We're not so far away from the gorillas and the apes, those beautiful creatures? And then, 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. We're supposed to do all these things which trouble us deeply because it's so against what we naturally would want to do. And if I've done anything, I've had kids express themselves as they are, impolitely, lovingly ? they don't mean any harm. They just don't know what the right way is. And as it turns out sometimes the so-called "right way" is utterly the wrong way. What a monstrous confusion."

"What I do as best I can is out of a deep respect for children, for how difficult their world is."

"What is a children's-book artist? A moron! Some ugly fat pip-squick of a person who can't be bothered to grow up. That's the way we're treated in the adult world of publishing."

"When Mozart is playing in my room, I am in conjunction with something I can't explain... I don't need to. I know that if there's a purpose for life, it was for me to hear Mozart."

"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."

"When you hide another story in a story, that?s the story I am telling the children."

"When Papa was away at sea, and Mama in the arbor... Ida played her wonderhorn to rock the baby still - but never watched."

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

"With books today, I'm not always sure if they're truthful or faithful to what's going on with children. If you look at the work of Tomi Ungerer, it's passionate, it's personal, it's marvelous and it's cuckoo, and it's that's kind of veracity that's always made for good children's literature."