Chuck Jones famous quotes

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

#Character #Drawing #Ends

Animation isn't the illusion of life; it is life
-- Chuck Jones

#Illusion #Animation

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

#Artist #Drawing #Way

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

#Art #Confusion #Innovation

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

#Two #Doe #Three

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.
-- Chuck Jones

#Simple #Skills

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.
-- Chuck Jones

#Ordinary #Needs #Esoteric

Each character represented a trait that resides in me.
-- Chuck Jones

#Character #Traits

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

#Confused #Fog #Color

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.
-- Chuck Jones

#Thinking #Essence #Drawing

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

#Animal #Personality

Animation means to invoke life, not to imitate it.
-- Chuck Jones

#Mean #Animation

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.
-- Chuck Jones

#Inspiration #Butterfly #Land

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

#Animal #Individuality #Individualism

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

#Drawing

The road is better than the end.
-- Chuck Jones

#Ends

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

#Laughter #Joy #Strange

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

#Character #Creating #Add

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

#Baby #Looks #Mouths

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.
-- Chuck Jones

#Dog #Cat #Drunk

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

#Effort #Suggestions #Criticize

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.
-- Chuck Jones

#Ivory Tower #Voice #Differences

I have to think as Bugs Bunny, not of Bugs Bunny.
-- Chuck Jones

#Thinking #Bunnies #Bugs

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.
-- Chuck Jones

#Sunshine #Light #Trying

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

#Together #Lions #Predator

Comedy is unusual people in real situations; farce is real people in unusual situations.
-- Chuck Jones

#Real #People #Farce

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.
-- Chuck Jones

#Believe #Communication #Self

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

#Justice #Vengeance #Judgment

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

#Husband #Wife

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

#Thinking #Long #Willingness

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.
-- Chuck Jones

#Wall #Flower #Smell

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.’
-- Chuck Jones

#Artist #Shoes #Drawing

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.
-- Chuck Jones

#Children #Book #Tests

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

#Jobs #Pay #Wanted

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

#Reading #Three #Littles

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

#War #Years #Use

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

#Book #People #Age

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.
-- Chuck Jones

#Running #Baby #Morning

[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.
-- Chuck Jones

#Fall #Worry #Coyotes

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

#Should #Worthwhile #Endeavor

An animator is an actor with a pencil.
-- Chuck Jones

#Actors #Animator #Pencils

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

#Expectations #Degrees #Results

Eschew the ordinary, disdain the commonplace
-- Chuck Jones

#Ordinary #Disdain

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.
-- Chuck Jones

#Character #Player #Ideas

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.
-- Chuck Jones

#Art #Simple #Drawing

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

#Keys #Drawing #Mind

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.
-- Chuck Jones

#Fall #Too Much #Unbearable

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.
-- Chuck Jones

#Drawing #Hundred #Thousand

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.
-- Chuck Jones

#Regret #Thinking #Knowing

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.
-- Chuck Jones

#Children #Men #Firsts

Comedy is a very, very, very stringent business.
-- Chuck Jones

#Comedy

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.
-- Chuck Jones

#Men #Ideas #Wells

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

#Way #Bugs #Rabbits

Bugs is who we want to be. Daffy is who we are.
-- Chuck Jones

#Want #Who We Are #Bugs

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.
-- Chuck Jones

#Summer #Confused #Fog

Often Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity.
-- Chuck Jones

#Art #Creativity #Hands

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

#Doors #Comedian #Persons

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

#Art #Laughter #Comedy