Chuck Jones Quotations

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

The Coyote is limited, as Bugs is limited, by his anatomy.

Each character represented a trait that resides in me.

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.

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

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

The only thing an adult can give a child is time.

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

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

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

Comedy is a very, very, very stringent business.

Mark Twain's Roughing It is a book that many people don't know about, but I highly recommend to anybody at any age.

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

I have come to know Bugs so well that I no longer have to think about what he is doing in any situation. I let the part of me that is Bugs come to the surface, knowing, with regret, that I can never match his marvelous confidence.

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.

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.

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

I started reading when I was about three, a little over three.

In 1918, when I was 6 or 7 years old, radio was just coming into use in the Great War.

We're in a slower-growth environment and as Larry said, if you can get 10 percent growth from organic growth and 10 percent from acquisition, it adds cash and adds earnings. That's as long as they can make the integration work.

H-P was in the dog house and in the 'show-me mode,' and it's really starting to show. I felt that after speaking with management and seeing some results that we were early on in the turnaround cycle.

I think it was the intent of both Washington Township and North Central to bring in as qualified of a coach as we could,

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

We don't know what caused the fire, but ultimately the building was heavily destroyed and we're currently investigating the cause of the fire,

Censorship, I believe, is the most dangerous enemy to all human communication, and piety of intention is probably the most dangerous, the most virulent and the most self-satisfying.

If you were to draw Bugs, the easiest way is to learn how to draw a carrot and then hook a rabbit onto it

Anyone can say 'no'. It is the first word a child learns and often the first word he speaks. It is a cheap word because it requires no explanation, and many men and women have acquired a reputation for intelligence who know only this word and have used it in place of thought on every occasion.

Often Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity.

If you make a fool of yourself in front of a cat, he will sneer at you, if you are sober; he will leave the room if you are drunk. If you make a fool of yourself in front a dog, he will make a fool of himself, too.

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.’

Dell is to a degree in the penalty box because expectations and probable results have gotten ratcheted down.

Eschew the ordinary, disdain the commonplace

Artists don't need criticism, artists need love

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

The name 'Chuck Jones', according to my uncle, limited my choice of profession to second baseman or cartoonist.

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.

Everything on Saturday morning [cartoons] moves alike that's one of the reasons it's not animation. The drawings are different, but everybody acts the same way, their feet move the same way, and everybody runs the same way. It doesn't matter whether it's an alligator or a man or a baby or anything, they all move the same.

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

The close-up, according to D.W. Griffith, allows subtle changes of facial expression-the raising of an eyebrow or the flicker of a smile-to become part of the action.

You've got a million bad drawings in you; you better get started.

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.

Fog and smog should not be confused and are easily separated by color. Fog is about the color of the insides of an old split wet summer cottage mattress; smog is the color and consistency of a wet potato chip soaked in a motorman’s glove.

The road is better than the end.

[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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Animation means to invoke life, not to imitate it.

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.

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.

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

An animator is an actor with a pencil.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

The top line looks very good, ... were better than expected just because of the size of the company.

This is the first true day of tech earnings, so it's a little hard to say. We've got two more big days in front of us.

They haven't been positioning themselves as a style company before. It's probably the right thing to do, unless they are moving away from a low price business model. And I highly doubt that.

It's a bargain. I'd gladly pay him another $808.6 million to have him create another $65 billion in market cap.

It was both a student athlete-oriented and program-oriented decision. We're very satisfied, and we think Bruce fits all of these criteria many times over. Plus, he's just a good, solid individual.

It's not impossible that you could have a student athlete going virtually every day, week after week, and that's not a good situation. We try to prevent that.

CA isn't well positioned from a growth standpoint.

All of a sudden long-term growth rate expectations have ratcheted down,