Joseph Barbera Quotes

Making cartoons means very hard work at every step of the way, but creating a successful cartoon character is the hardest work of all.

I cannot say who, precisely, came up with the idea of a Stone Age family.

That's what keeps me going: dreaming, inventing, then hoping and dreaming some more in order to keep dreaming.

I learned long ago to accept the fact that not everything I create will see the light of day.

Parents look at me like I'm somebody pretty important, and say, We were raised on your characters, and now we're enjoying them all over again with our children.

What about Mickey Mouse? Disney tried very hard to make him a star. But Mickey Mouse is more of a symbol than a real character.

Creating fantasy is a very personal thing, but you can't take the process too personally.

Publicity gets more than a little tiring. You want it, you need it, you crave it, and you're scared as hell when it stops.

I have spent a lot of years on the outside looking in.

My biggest kick comes from the individual fans I run into. Middle-aged men ask me when we're going to do more Johnny Quest cartoons.

I never got tired of Tom and Jerry, but I did have a dream of doing more with my life than making cartoons.

The Christmas parties were orgies of drinking and singing and groping and pawing. Cartoon staffers invested their own money in preparatory liquor.

High-level, big-deal publicity has a way of getting old for me, but what never fails to thrill me is when I make personal appearances.

So the stock market could have a negative wealth effect and weigh on capital spending, but a sharp decline in long-term interest rates would be an important counterweight.

What the real world of 1941 needed most was the release and relief provided by laughter.

I was convinced there as only one actor to play Templeton the Rat, and that was Tony Randall.

While I have never been a regular churchgoer, I'm anything but immune to the power and the majesty of the religious experience.

Except for me, no one in my family could draw.

I don't know anyone who enjoys going to the hospital. To help remedy this, I got an idea to create what a Laugh Room in the pediatric ward of hospitals.

Faced with the choice of enduring a bad toothache or going to the dentist, we generally tried to ride out the bad tooth.

In those days, boxing was very glamorous and romantic. You listened to fights on the radio, and a good announcer made it seem like a contest between gladiators.

I was 82 years old before Who's Who thought I was enough of a big shot to do a piece on me.

One of the most attractive things about writing your autobiography is that you're not dead.

Not once in six years did I make it to the office by 9 on the dot.

Los Angeles was an impression of failure, of disappointment, of despair, and of oddly makeshift lives. This is California? I thought.