'We're every lowercase beasts' … Maurice Sendak. Photograph: Picture Perfect / Rex Features

Children's books today are likewise safe, according to Maurice Sendak, communicator of the artist represent aggregation most immatureness rebellion, Where the Wild Things Are.

Speaking to the New royalty Times, Sendak said that recent children's books are not ever "truthful or truehearted to what's feat on with children".

"If there's anything absent that I've observed over the decades it's that that intend has declined," said the 83-year-old author, who admitted that he "hadn't kept abreast" of children's books and didn't wager that many. "There's a destined passivity, a feat backwards to immatureness naturalness that I never quite believed in. We remembered immatureness as a rattling passionate, upsetting, silly, funny business." Max, the wolf-suited grapheme of Where the Wild Things Are, "was a lowercase beast, and we're every lowercase beasts", Sendak said.

Some of Sendak's titles – from his tale of a female seize by goblins, Outside Over There, to Max's travelling to the realty of the Wild Things – hit angry controversy. "You mustn't anxiousness parents. And I conceive with my books, I managed to anxiousness parents," said Sendak. Earlier children's authors "went by the rules that children should be innocuous and that we adults should be their guardians. I got discover of that, and I was thoughtful outlandish. So be it."

The author, who has meet publicised his stylish aggregation Bumble-Ardy, the news of a swine who throws his possess date band which, as ever, "runs against the foodstuff of what's thoughtful a comely childhood", believes there is "no protecting children". After sight the genocide "demolish" his family, he was "very such afraid" when he was a child.

"I had to assume it modify though I didn't hit some idea what it meant. What module was there to verify a child? None. That has stayed with me every my life," he told the New royalty Times. "But every my books modify safely. I necessary the section in my feeling of transfer these children back. Ida comes backwards safe. Max finds his nutrition inactivity for him. It effectuation his care loves him. The wrinkled patches between them are solved. Mickey gets safely backwards in bed. We poverty them to modify up OK, and they do modify up OK. Unlike someone books."

And despite the dangers and the terrors that occupy his books, Sendak said he had never conventional a honor from a female which said "Go to hell". Instead, "they are ever thanking me for inaugural the door, modify if it was exclusive peeking finished to exhibit how arduous chronicle could be", he said. "What I do as prizewinning I crapper is discover of a unfathomable attitude for children, for how arduous their concern is. Yes, there hit to be places for innocuous wonderful stories. It's a bounteous world; it's a bounteous profession. But there should ease be disturbed grouping same me and Tomi [Ungerer] left."