Date of Birth: June 10, 1928
Birthplace: Brooklyn, NY
Current Residence: Ridgefield, CT
Education: Attended Art Students' League, 1949-51.

It is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming Wild Things. It is my involvement with this inescapable fact of childhood—the awful vulnerability of children and their struggle to make themselves King of All Wild Things—that gives my work whatever truth and passion it may have.
-Maurice Sendak, Rolling Stone Magazine, December 30, 1976

But this third book (Outside Over There ) will reverberate on triple levels. It's so dense already... I don't even know what it means and I can't get beyond the first seven lines. But I'll get there, I feel it inside me—like a woman having a baby, all that life churning on inside me. I feel it every day: it moves stretches, yawns... it's getting ready to be born.
-Maurice Sendak, Rolling Stone, December 30, 1976

His gift for the interplay of fantasy and reality, his feeling that children are his peers, not to be treated with condescension or servility, are realized throughout his work., Life, December 11, 1964