Quotes

There must be more to life than having everything.

I think Disney is terrible for young children.

All I wanted was to be straight so my parents could be happy. They never, never, never knew. [In a 2008 New York Times interview, talking about never telling his parents he was gay.].

[Interview by Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report (2005), 1/25/2012] Newt Gingrich is an idiot of great renown. There is something so hopelessly gross and vile about him, that it's hard to take him seriously.

[from an interview in 2011] I have nothing now but praise for my life. I'm not unhappy. I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can't stop them. They leave me and I love them more. 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.

I refuse to lie to children. I refuse to cater to the bullshit of innocence.

I remember my own childhood vividly - I knew terrible things. But I knew I mustn't let adults know I knew. It would scare them.

If Ursula Nordstrom hadn't pursued everybody on the board of the Caldecott Newberry Committee, I'd never have won. I was the bad boy; I was always into bad-boy books.

I want to kill everybody in publishing; I want to see them all laid out.

The town that my mother lived in and was born in... the town was burnt to the ground by the Germans, and my grandmother and her children got out and came to America. Tiresome, deadly people. I mean, yes, we're so happy for those who survived, but some of them were just like regular people. You hated them. When I finally got to envision what the Wild Things looked like, that's what they looked like: those greedy uncles and aunts who came to eat my food.

When I was a child, and I was shopping with my mother and she was holding my hand because I was a very little boy, and I passed the newsstand, and I saw a picture of a the Lindbergh baby dead in the woods... and I took my mother to see it. And apparently nobody but me saw it... It's only in the past few years that I realized Colonel Lindbergh was so enraged that that picture was used and it was taken off the afternoon edition; I saw the morning edition. I spent my whole life believing I saw that picture. But that to me is why children are so important: they see things.

I wrote exactly what was in my head. I never set out to write books for children. I'm no more interested in them than I am in grown-ups. My work is peculiar. I'm a middle-aged elderly man and I have kids swimming in milk, and you can't put that on the same shelf as Norman Mailer of Saul Bellow. What are you going to do with it? You put it in the kiddie section. But it isn't because I intended it to be there. It's how my head works.

In my own business of publishing, one watches with growing dismay the ersatz quality of bookmaking, the vanishing forever of traditional Linotype faces and the degeneration of paper. Over the past few decades, there has been a collapse of the sense of pride in craftsmanship, of the sense of excellence. Usually, this has nothing to do with money. A rough, early Mickey Mouse short -- any one of them! -- is superior to the animation that is currently manufactured for television. We are in the dark McDonald's age of the quick and easy.

When I write and draw, I'm experiencing what the child in the book is going through. I was as relieved to get back from Max's journey as he was.

I was a miserable kid. I couldn't make friends, I couldn't skate great, I couldn't play stoop-ball terrific - I stayed home and drew pictures. You know what they all thought of me: sissy Maurice Sendak. Whenever I wanted to go out and do something, my father would say 'You'll catch a cold.' And I did. I did whatever he told me.

Disney has often been condemned for corrupting the classics, and he has, to be sure, occasionally slipped in matters of taste and absolute fidelity to the original. But he has never corrupted. If there have been errors, they are nothing compared to the violations against the true nature and psychology of children committed by some of the so-called classics.