Maurice Sendak Kids Quotations

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.

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

I don't have kids at all and I thank God that I never did.

Do parents sit down and tell their kids everything? I don't know. I don't know.

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

I want to be free again. I want to be free like when I was a kid, working with my brother and making toy airplanes and a whole model of the World's Fair in 1939 out of wax.

Kids lead a very private life.

Kids books Grownup books That's just marketing. Books are books,

Do parents sit down and tell their kids everything? I don't know. I don't know. I've convinced myself - I hope I'm right - that children despair of you if you don't tell them the truth.

We're animals. We're violent. We're criminal. And if I've done anything, I've had kids express themselves as they are.

All I liked to do when I was a kid was draw. My childhood was like my adult life: drawing pictures with my brother, putting the comics up on the glass window, and tracing the characters onto tracing paper or drawing paper and then coloring them. That and making things was all we ever did.

If there's any advice I have to give, I would say it's that. If you're looking for a way to get closer to your kids, there ain't no better way than to grab 'em and read. And if you put them in front of a computer or a TV, you are abandoning them. You are abandoning them because they are sitting on a couch or a floor and they may be hugging a dog, but they ain't hugging you.

Kids never get pissed at their parents. Unheard of.

All I liked to do when I was a kid was draw.

As a kid, all I thought about was death. But you can't tell your parents that.

My sister had her own room. She also had innumerable boyfriends. I had a yo-yo collection that was beyond belief, and the reason I had it was mostly that I would stand in the doorway of the living room watching her and her boyfriend. Finally she caught on how to get this kid out of the way. Give him a yo-yo!

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.

Then one day my sister abandoned me at the 1939 World's Fair, and that incident is the essence of In the Night Kitchen. I was standing there with hundreds of other people waving back at the little midgets dressed like bakers when I turned around and my sister was gone! The next thing I know I'm screaming and crying and policemen are taking me to a big place with tons of kids who had all been abandoned like me. At least I was old enough to give them a name and an address.

Kids tell you what they think, not what they think they should think.

I write books that seem more suitable for children, and that's OK with me. They are a better audience and tougher critics. Kids tell you what they think, not what they think they should think.

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?

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.

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.