Jim Henson Quotes - Page 3

Watch out for the icy patch

I've never felt any sense of competition with anybody, and we're all friends. We're all good friends.

A film is not done by one person. It's done by a lot of people. I love this whole collaborative aspect. When it works well, you end up with something better than any of us started out to do.

(Lisa Henson about her father) He admired the job of the man who walks along the road picking up trash with a long stick. He thought that guy had a great job, walking along with a stick, enjoying the road, and doing only good in the world, with hundreds of small actions.

I guess I was wrong when I said I never promised anyone. I promised me.

When I was a kid, I never saw a puppet show. I never played with puppets or had any interest in them.

Television is basically teaching whether you want it to or not.

I don't want'a die... I have other plans!

You're assisting the audience to understand; you're giving them a bridge or an access. And if you don't give them that, if you keep it more abstract, it's almost more pure. It's a cooler thing.

Well, Detroit Institute is kind of a key - probably the largest permanent collection of puppets in the US.

I know that I personally have felt quite happy because I've done what I wanted to do. I pursued my interests and have thus managed to combine my business with lots of fun. I guess my only advice is to do what you enjoy, and try to do your best with it.

I was very interested in theatre, mostly in stage design. I did a little bit of acting.

No, there's not much competition between puppeteers in general because everybody's working their own style.

If you take a character and you call him a frog, or like Rowlf, our dog, call him a dog, you immediately give the audience a handle.

When The Muppet Show ended, we all sat around and said, what kind of television show would we like to do. We felt the need these days are for some quality children's programming.

It has always been difficult to get Big Bird to be very pretty. Big Bird in England is much more gorgeous.

It's into the same bag as E.T. and Yoda, wherein you're trying to create something that people will actually believe, but it's not so much a symbol of the thing, but you're trying to do the thing itself.

Yeah, I did some small parts in high school and the first year of college and then fairly soon thereafter I settled into the backstage scenery, and then at the University of Maryland I was doing posters for their productions.

Yeah, well when I first started working, it was $5 a show; it was probably a little higher by the time I got to my own show, but I remember that they put me under contract at $100 a week, which to me was really an astronomical price.

I think my own strengths are in television production.

Actually the copies of characters is something I don't particularly like to talk about in articles but just for your information, most characters there's only one.

At the University of Maryland, my first year I started off planning to major in art because I was interested in theatre design, stage design or television design.

Somebody like a Piggy or a Kermit, there needs to be several versions and so there will be several of them.

At the time of Polaroid - and I did a couple of other commercials just before I stopped doing that stuff - at that point I was at the level where they respect you and your opinion and all that sort of thing.

If anything, there's a difference in working with color in England and the color in the US.