The prolific and influential writer and illustrator Maurice Sendak is best known for Where The Wild Things Are, considered one of the all-time greats of children's literature. That classification as "children's literature" is just one of the many ideas to which the venerable and indeed hilariously indignant author objects this recent interview with The Colbert Report host Stephen Colbert, which could propel Sendak to a new career in professional curmudgeonry. Sendak puts Colbert in his place, remarking that the faux-conservative talking head would make a best-selling children's book author simply by virtue of the fact that he's "an idiot" whose work is "delicate, irrational, and has a terrible quality of ordinariness... supremely ordinary."

Among the other topics Sendak takes on with unchallenged righteousness: Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrinch, the present state of children's literature, his contemporaries, the prospects of a sequel to Where The Wild Things Are, and, perhaps most interestingly, E-books: "F*ck them," remarked the 87-year-old Sendak. "I hate those E-books. They cannot be the future. They may well be. I will be dead. I won't give a sh*t."




[Via The Mary Sue]