If life is so critical, if Anne Frank could die, if my friend could die, children were as vulnerable as adults, and that gave me a secret purpose to my work, to make them live. Because I wanted to live. I wanted to grow up.
I have been doodling with ink and watercolor on paper all my life. It’s my way of stirring up my imagination to see what I find hidden in my head. I call the results dream pictures, fantasy sketches, and even brain-sharpenin g exercises.
How do you write for children? I really have never figured that out. So I decided to just ignore it.
Art has always been my salvation.
What is the point of it all? Not leaving legacies. But being ripe. Being ripe.
I became a set designer for opera. I’m a great opera buff, I love classical music, and I needed a time-out.
I do not remember any proper children’s books in my childhood. I was not exposed to them.
I’m scared of watching a TV show about vampires. I can’t fall asleep.
Kids lead a very private life.
I’d like to believe an accumulation of experience has made me a sort of a grown-up person, so I can have judgment and taste and whatever.
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.
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.
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.
He’s just a boy, pretending to be a wolf, pretending to be king.
It is sometimes hard to be a family.
I am in love with the world.
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.
And the wild things... gnashed their terrible teeth...
Max stepped into his private boat and waved goodbye and sailed back over a year and in and out of weeks and through a day and into the night of his very own room where he found his supper waiting for him – and it was still hot.
I am not a religious person, nor do I have any regrets. The war took care of the for me.
I am finding out as I am aging that I am in love with the world.