MAURICE SENDAK

Why my needle is stuck in childhood I don’t know. I guess that’s where my heart is.

Daily Painting

Maurice Sendak
From MR. RABBIT AND THE LOVELY PRESENT (1971)

MAURICE SENDAK

Even as a kid, my sister, who was the eldest, brought books home for me, and I think I spent more time sniffing and touching them than reading. I just remember the joy of the book, the beauty of the binding. The smelling of the interior. Happy.

Maurice Sendak
Shirim Klezmer Orchestra
PINCUS AND THE PIG
A Klezmer Tale

MAURICE SENDAK
____________________

I’m not Hans Christian Andersen. Nobody’s gonna make a statue in the park with a lot of scrambling kids climbing up me. I won’t have it, okay?

FATHER BEAR COMES HOME

Else Holmelund Minarik
Maurice Sendak

LITTLE BEAR

Else Holmelund Minarik
Maurice Sendak

MAURICE SENDAK

Why my needle is stuck in childhood I don’t know. I guess that’s where my heart is.

MAURICE SENDAK

Why my needle is stuck in childhood I don’t know. I guess that’s where my heart is.

MAURICE SENDAK

Even as a kid, my sister, who was the eldest, brought books home for me, and I think I spent more time sniffing and touching them than reading. I just remember the joy of the book, the beauty of the binding. The smelling of the interior. Happy.

MAURICE SENDAK

From their earliest years children live on familiar terms with disrupting emotions, fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of their everyday lives, they continually cope with frustrations as best they can. And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming Wild Things.

MAURICE SENDAK

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

MAURICE SENDAK

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.

Maurice Sendak

I was sickly as a child and gravitated to books and drawing. During my early teen years, I spent hundreds of hours at my window, sketching neighborhood children at play. I sketched and listened, and those notebooks became the fertile field of my work later on. There is not a book I have written or a picture I have drawn that does not, in some way, owe them its existence. 

MAURICE SENDAK

Art has always been my salvation. And my gods are Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Mozart. I believe in them with all my heart. And 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.

MAURICE SENDAK

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.