Maurice Sendak Quotes about Children - Page 2

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

Thank God that Bumble-Ardy's parents are dead so we don't have to wonder what they did to him. We only know that they were famous, and famous people have unhappy children for the most part. They don't have the time to take care of them. So he's a troubled pig-boy, a kid you've got to watch.

Bumble-Ardy is a very wicked little child as far as I'm concerned. He's not to be trusted.

I was a very sickly child. My parents were immigrants. They were not decorous. They were not discreet. They always thought I was gonna die.

I never set out to write books for children. I don't have a feeling that I'm gonna save children or my life is devoted.

I don't believe in things literally for children. That's a reduction.

I do not remember any proper children's books in my childhood. I was not exposed to them.

Certainly we want to protect our children from new and painful experiences that are beyond their emotional comprehension and that intensify anxiety; and to a point we can prevent premature exposure to such experiences.

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

I don't know how to write a children's book.

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

In plain terms, a child is a complicated creature who can drive you crazy. There's a cruelty to childhood, there's an anger.

I adored Mickey Mouse when I was a child. He was the emblem of happiness and funniness.

I mean, being a child was being a child, was being a creature without power, without pocket money, without escape routes of any kind. So I didn't want to be a child.

If children are different from us, they are more spontaneous. Grown-up lives have become overlaid with dross.

Most children - I know I did when I was a kid - fantasize another set of parents. Or fantasize no parents. They don't tell their real parents about that - you don't want to tell Mom and Dad. Kids lead a very private life. And I was a typical child, I think. I was a liar.

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.

It was inconceivable to me as a child that I would be an adult. I mean, one assumed that it would happen, but obviously it didn't happen, or if it did, it happened when your back was turned, and then suddenly you were there. So I couldn't have thought about it much.

I never thought of Bumble-Ardy in that way. But I still have that same deep feeling for children who are in dire trouble. I see Bumble-Ardy as a lonely, unhappy kid who is doing the very best he can to be in the world, to have a party.