Maurice Sendak Quotes

I bugged my mom and dad to 'get me inside the television set' when I was about four years old.

Most children - I know I did when I was a kid - fantasize another set of parents. Or fantasize no parents. They don't tell their real parents about that - you don't want to tell Mom and Dad.

My mom, through my dad, rented the apartment next door to his... he had the lease on both places. But then, she would dress up and act like his maid... a practical maid. No fantasies.

The house was big enough for my brother and me to have firecracker wars at one end and leave Mom and Dad undisturbed at the other. When firecrackers weren't available, we attacked each other with pennies and marbles and clumps of Crisco, which made brilliant greasy asterisks when you missed and hit the wall.

Anyone must remember that dad left when I was 3 years old. Mom and I lived out of the limelight. We lived a totally different life.

Are we all living like this? Two lives, the ideal outer life and the inner imaginative life where we keep our secrets?

When I was a kid, I played sports a lot. My mom and dad were divorced, but I hung out in the neighborhood a lot, and it was all about sports. I would be out all day on the sand lot or on the hockey rink. My dad would take me to baseball games, but he worked so hard, and he would always fall asleep.

I grew up in a two-bedroom house with my grandfather, my mom and dad and four kids. I slept on the couch or on the floor, and I always wanted to have my own space.

My mom and dad? Oh, they were a fiery pair. They stayed together for the kids and also because they were hopelessly in love with each other, but they were totally incompatible.

No, like I said, my dad was never really part of the tennis. His involvement around what I did with the tennis and with my mom and my grandparents was really not a part of my life.

My mom and dad got divorced when I was very young, and growing up in a family where the head of the household wasn't a man made a big difference.

I fell in love with stories watching a British television puppet show called 'Thunderbirds' when it first came out on TV, about 1965, so I would have been 4 or 5 years old. I went out into the garden at my mom and dad's house, and I used to play with my little dinky toys, little cars and trucks and things.

My earliest acting memory is making up a play for my mom and dad called The Lonesome Baby. I have no idea what The Lonesome Baby was about. I just remember the title. But I'm sure it was an epic.

I've been a vegetarian since I was about 12 years old. When I became a vegetarian, I got my mom and dad to become vegetarian, and my brother became a vegetarian.

It is a sad commentary of our times when our young must seek advice and counsel from 'Dear Abby' instead of going to Mom and Dad.

My mom and dad just loved the fact that I fooled around. They just embraced it. They'd always kind of enjoy it, and they liked it when I made them laugh.

I remember taking my mom and dad to the premiere of 'The Inbetweeners Movie' and being really nervous. My mom was like, 'Laura, don't worry: I've watched all of the first series of the TV show, so I understand what this is going to be like.'

I had what you could call a chaotic childhood. My parents divorced when I was 2; I went back and forth between my mom's and dad's houses for years. But, you know, my parents tried to do the right thing. As crazy as everything was, and as much fighting and everything, there was always a feeling of support from them.

I know not every mom is a secret KGB spy, but every mom has this whole other life. Every dad and every person has this whole other life.

There's a lot of influences that I have from Detroit that are subliminal. I mean, I spent the first 10 years of my life there. My mom and dad were born and raised there, so a lot of that rubbed off on me. When I get angry, sometimes a Detroit accent comes out.

I feel like I've lived quite a sheltered life, like my mom and dad were quite protective of me.

I don't have mom issues or dad issues. I think I have found peace about many things in my past. I have forgiven and asked to be forgiven.

I used to tell people my father was a plumber, because that would mean we had a normal life.

I don't know where my romanticism comes from. My mom and dad would read to me a lot. 'Treasure Island,' 'Robinson Crusoe,' tales of chivalry and knights, things like that. Those are the stories I loved growing up.

My mom and dad got divorced, so it was one of those things where Sundays I'd go to Dad's apartment, and this was, say, 1970-whatever, and it had a pool table on the top floor in a very traditional kind of divorced-dad apartment building.