“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.”

“Can you draw a picture on the blackboard when somebody doesn't want you to? asked the rooster promptly."Yes," answered Kenny," if you write them a very nice poem.""What is an only goat?" "A lonely goat," answered Kenny.The rooster shut one eye and looked at Kenny."can you hear a horse on the roof?" he asked."If you know how to listen in the night," said Kenny."Can you fix a broken promise?""Yes," said Kenny,"if it only looks broken,but really isn't."The rooster drew his head back into his feathers and whispered, "What is a very narrow escape?""When somebody almost stops loving you," Kenny whispered back.”

“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.”

“I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can't stop them. They leave me and I love them more.”

“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...”

“Sendak is in search of what he calls a "yummy death". William Blake set the standard, jumping up from his death bed at the last minute to start singing. "A happy death," says Sendak. "It can be done." He lifts his eyebrows to two peaks. "If you're William Blake and totally crazy.”

“Then from far away across the world he smelled good things to eat, so he gave up being king of the wild things.”