Chuck Jones Quotes

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Animation means to invoke life, not to imitate it.

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

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.

The road is better than the inn.

[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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Often Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity.

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

Artists don't need criticism, artists need love

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.

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