Maurice Sendak: 1928-2012

• If I walk in the woods and I see an animal, the purpose of my life was to see that animal. I can recollect it, I can notice it. I’m here to take note of. And that is beyond my ego, beyond anything that belongs to me, an observer, an observer.
• All children were in the Holocaust. Everybody was in the Holocaust.
• You can’t get rid of evil. We can’t, and I feel that so intensely. All the idiots that keep coming into the world and wrecking people’s lives.
• We’re animals. We’re violent. We’re criminal. We’re not so far away from the gorillas and the apes, those beautiful creatures. … And then, we’re supposed to be civilized.
• I’m like guerrilla warfare in my best books.

Maurice Sendak poses with a character from his book "Where the Wild Things Are." 2002 photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images.

Spiegelman honors Sendak in the New Yorker (1993) – through BoingBoing and Neil Gaiman