Maurice Sendak: My Favorite Curmudgeon

Maurice Sendak gives the best interviews. Always utterly straightforward, never PR-ish, he shows flashes of bitterness and misanthropy (which can be funny or sad, depending). He’s a brilliant artist and one of the first writers for children who didn’t condescend, and I’ve never been bored by an interview with him.

Take these quotes from a recent New York Times interview…
On comic books: “Little books that you just wanted to eat like a sandwich.”
On global warming: “The world is twice as crazy as it’s ever been… What have we done to the weather? How do you explain that to the children?”
On fan letters: “I have never had a letter from a child that said, ‘Go to hell.'”

Read the rest. Sounds like in he was probably in a pretty good mood; on his cranky days, you can really tell. He told the NYT in 2008, “I hate people” (he prefers dogs). When Spike Jonze made a documentary about him (after the adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are), Jonze asked him if he had any advice for young people. It was this: “Quit this life as soon as possible. Get out, get out.” I love this man, and I love even more that his job is making art and literature for very young children.

Thanks, Slog Tipper Kitri.

UPDATE: Commenters Yoder and rob! suggest this Fresh Air interview with Sendak, which is far, far more awesome than what I posted above, and includes this:

I would infinitely prefer a daughter. If I had a son, I would leave him at the A&P or some other big advertising place where somebody who needs a kid would find him and he would be all right. … A daughter would be drawn to me. A daughter would want to help me. Girls are infinitely more complicated than boys and women more than men. And there’s no doubt about that. We just don’t like to think about it. Certainly the men don’t like to think about it. I have lived my whole life with a dream daughter.

I repeat: I love this man.