Maurice Sendak Quotes

Watching something being constructed, whether you're passing a building site or whether you're watching an artist at work, is fascinating, and I think that's the enjoyment.

I wouldn't know how to design. I couldn't even if I wanted to, for I can't draw, and a pair of scissors in my hands becomes a dangerous weapon.

It wasn't that I had any great dream of being an architect. I just wanted to make things. Whether it was furniture, painting, interior design, or architecture. I just wanted to create something.

Carved with figures strange and sweet, All made out of the carver's brain.

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.

Anything is an art if you do it at the level of an art.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

The body is your instrument in dance, but your art is outside that creature, the body.

I'm born with a pencil in my hand. I did lots of sketching.

Men admire the man who can organize their wishes and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass.

Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.

You wind up creating from silence, like painting a picture on a blank canvas that could bring tears to somebody's eyes. As songwriters, our blank canvas is silence. Then we write a song from an idea that can change somebody's life. Songwriting is the closest thing to magic that we could ever experience. That's why I love songwriting.

I always liked creativity, whether it was to draw or sew - any creative assignment I was getting from school, or just on my own.

There is something magical in seeing what you can do, what texture and tone and colour you can produce merely with a pen point and a bottle of ink.

I'm interested in creating new work.

I always knew that I wanted to be creative, that I wanted to create something.

Somebody informed me recently that the key to every art, from writing to gardening to sculpture, is creativity. I beg to differ.

Cartoonists' dirty secret is that we tend to come up with stories that involve things that are really fun to draw.

What a blessed thing it is, that Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left!

Anything you can do to express yourself is a form of art. That's why I love my craft so much. I always wanted to play other artists. If I can't play an instrument, then I want to play a character that can. There is an artist behind everything, and I think that's beautiful.

I don't really picture anyone when I'm drawing. They just become their own completed person with googly eyes.

Creating is a lonely thing in a lot of ways.

I was very much in my room with my marionette stage, you know, creating these incredibly boring things that I felt were so fascinating, and forcing my relatives to come, and charging money for them to see my little productions.

Actors spend most of their time out of work, so I actually spend more time making furniture. The thing about furniture that's much better than acting is that it's just me. There's no director, no script - the concept is me, unless a client wants something.

Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.