Chuck Jones Quotes

Fog and smog should not be confused and are easily separated by color.

Animation isn't the illusion of life; it is life

If you start with character, you probably will end up with good drawings.

The rules are simple. Take your work, but never yourself, seriously. Pour in the love and whatever skill you have, and it will come out.

The author O. Henry taught me about the value of the unexpected. He once wrote about the noise of flowers and the smell of birds—the birds were chickens and the flowers dried sunflowers rattling against a wall.

Animation means to invoke life, not to imitate it.

Bugs is who we want to be. Daffy is who we are.

All worthwhile endeavors are 90% work and 10% love, and only the love should show.

Every artist has thousands of bad drawings in them and the only way to get rid of them is to draw them out.

You can't force inspiration. It's like trying to catch a butterfly with a hoop but no net. If you keep your mind open and receptive, though, one day a butterfly will land on your finger.

An animator is an actor with a pencil.

Disney was not a good animator, he didn't draw well at all, but he was always a great idea man, and a good writer.

A lion's work hours are only when he's hungry; once he's satisfied, the predator and prey live peacefully together.

You do not 'suffer' if you decide 'that's the way it is' rather than 'why is it this way?'

Anyone can negatively criticize - it is the cheapest of all comment because it requires not a modicum of the effort that suggestion requires.

Eschew the ordinary, disdain the commonplace. If you have a single-minded need for something, let it be the unusual, the esoteric, the bizarre, the unexpected.

Often Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity.

Once you have heard a strange audience burst into laughter at a film you directed, you realize what the word joy is all about.

Eschew the ordinary, disdain the commonplace

The weatherman is not only blamed for his failure to foretell, he is blamed for the weather itself.

The whole essence of good drawing - and of good thinking, perhaps - is to work a subject down to the simplest form possible and still have it believable for what it is meant to be.

Jackie Gleason said that comedy is the most exacting form of dramatic art, because it has an instant critic: laughter.

If you want a midget to look like a baby, don’t put a cigar in his mouth.

There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is the willingness to think.

We must not confuse distortion with innovation; distortion is useless change, art is beneficial change.

All of you here have one hundred thousand bad drawings in you. The sooner you get rid of them, the better it will be for everyone.

An idea has no worth at all without believable characters to implement it; a plot without characters is like a tennis court without players. Daffy Duck is to a Buck Rogers story what John McEnroe was to tennis. Personality. That is the key, the drum, the fife. Forget the plot.

In timing a film, we used to assume that sneaks move slowly. This was great for animators-thirty-six to forty-eight drawings for a single step-but it was sheer hell for the pace of the picture. So the rapid tiptoe was invented.

As you become acquainted with a character you are creating, you add parts of yourself that are pertinent to that character.

I have to think as Bugs Bunny, not of Bugs Bunny.

Well, directing is doing the key drawings, not the key animation, mind you.

Painting does what we cannot do—it brings a three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional plane.

When critics sit in judgment it is hard to tell where justice leaves off and vengeance begins.

The older I get, the more individuality I find in animals and the less I find in humans.

I'm still astonished that somebody would offer me a job and pay me to do what I wanted to do.

The only time a wife listens to her husband is when he’s asleep.

When a young artist asked me for advice on drawing the human foot, I told him, ‘The first thing you must learn is how to take your shoe off, and then how to take your sock off, then prop your leg up carefully on your other knee, take a piece of paper, and draw your foot.’

Early experiences convinced me that animals can and do have quite distinct personalities.

Humiliation and indifference, these are conditions every one of us finds unbearable — this is why the Coyote when falling is more concerned with the audience’s opinion of him than he is with the inevitable result of too much gravity.

I'm not a believer in putting designers off in an ivory tower. They need to have a voice at the table so they can identify where and why design can make a difference. We also need to understand the business issues. If we don't make our numbers this quarter, we don't earn the right to do something cool the next time.

Comedy is unusual people in real situations; farce is real people in unusual situations.

A comedian is not a person who opens a funny door - he's the person who opens a door funny.

Every great artist must begin by learning to draw with the single line, and my advice to young animators is to learn how to live with that razor-sharp instrument or art. An artist who comes to me with eight or ten good drawings of the human figure in simple lines has a good chance of being hired. But I will tell the artist who comes with a bunch of drawings of Bugs Bunny to go back and learn how to draw the human body. An artist who knows that can learn how to draw ANYTHING, including Bugs Bunny.

Human beings will line up for miles to buy a bucket of catastrophes, but don't try selling sunshine and light - you'll go broke.

Comedy is a very, very, very stringent business.

Each character represented a trait that resides in me.

There's only one test of a great children's book, or a great children's film, and that is this: If it can be read or viewed with pleasure by adults, then it has the chance to be a great children's film, or a great children's book.

You have a coyote inside you and you have to get it out

[W]hen the coyote falls, he gets up and brushes himself off; it's preservation of dignity. He's humiliated, and it worries him when he ends up looking like an accordion. A coyote isn't much, but it's better than being an accordion.

Artists don't need criticism, artists need love