In a 1993 article in The Times, Maurice Sendak, who died Tuesday morning at the age of 83, told Sarah Lyall: “Grown-ups desperately need to feel safe, and then they project onto the kids. But what none of us seem to realize is how smart kids are. They don’t like what we write for them, what we dish up for them, because it’s vapid, so they’ll go for the hard words, they’ll go for the hard concepts, they’ll go for the stuff where they can learn something, not didactic things, but passionate things.”

Mr. Sendak had a fellow traveler in his legendary editor at Harper & Row, Ursula Nordstrom, who also bristled at the over-protection of children. The collection of her letters, “Dear Genius,” is a treat, and includes correspondence between her and Mr. Sendak. (He drew the illustration of her for the book’s cover.) “You may not be Tolstoy,” Ms. Nordstrom once wrote to Mr. Sendak after he expressed self-doubt, “but Tolstoy wasn’t Sendak, either. You have a vast and beautiful genius.”

Though he didn’t publish much in recent years, Mr. Sendak did appear in the media several times, always voicing his strong opinions about various topics. Last September, he spoke to The Times’s Pamela Paul about his book “Bumble-Ardy,” and commented on several famous works for children, including his own “Where the Wild Things Are” (“Children who fight back, children who are full of excitement are the kind of children I like.”) and “Alice in Wonderland”: “It’s a terrifying book; it’s a nightmare. That to me comes as close to the world of childhood as great books do. Carroll was allowing for nightmare, murderous impulses. I don’t know why he got away from it. He told the truth about childhood, about how unsafe it was.”

In a much-discussed profile for the Guardian last October, Emma Brockes recorded several gems from Mr. Sendak, including this mini-rant about e-books: “I hate them. It’s like making believe there’s another kind of sex. There isn’t another kind of sex. There isn’t another kind of book! A book is a book is a book.”

But most memorable was Mr. Sendak’s hilarious two-part interview with Stephen Colbert, in which the illustrator talked about how he didn’t write for children; gave Mr. Colbert permission to publish a “Wild Things” sequel starring Vin Diesel; and sniffed markers. Telling Mr. Sendak he wanted to get into the children’s book business, Mr. Colbert asked, “What’s it take for a celebrity to make a successful book?” Mr. Sendak responded: “You’ve started already by being an idiot.” Part one of their interview is here. Part two is below: