Chuck Jones Quotes

#1. 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

#2. Animation means to invoke life, not to imitate it.

Chuck Jones

#3. You have a coyote inside you and you have to get it out

Chuck Jones

#4. Each character represented a trait that resides in me.

Chuck Jones

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

Chuck Jones

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

Chuck Jones

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

Chuck Jones

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

Chuck Jones

#9. 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

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

Chuck Jones

#11. 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

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

Chuck Jones

#13. 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

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

Chuck Jones

#15. 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

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

Chuck Jones

#17. 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

#18. 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

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

Chuck Jones

#20. 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

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

Chuck Jones

#22. 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

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

Chuck Jones

#24. 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

#25. Comedy is a very, very, very stringent business.

Chuck Jones

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

Chuck Jones

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

Chuck Jones

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

Chuck Jones

#29. An animator is an actor with a pencil.

Chuck Jones

#30. Animation isn't the illusion of life; it is life

Chuck Jones

#31. 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

#32. [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

#33. The road is better than the end.

Chuck Jones

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

Chuck Jones

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

Chuck Jones

#36. 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

#37. 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.

Chuck Jones

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

Chuck Jones

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

Chuck Jones

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

Chuck Jones

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

Chuck Jones

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

Chuck Jones

#43. I have come to know Bugs so well that I no longer have to think about what he is doing in any situation.

Chuck Jones

#44. 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

#45. Artists don't need criticism, artists need love

Chuck Jones

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. The only time a wife listens to her husband is when he's asleep.

Chuck Jones

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

Chuck Jones

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

Chuck Jones

#51. 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

#52. 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.

Chuck Jones

#53. All of you have one hundred thousand bad drawings in you. The sooner you get rid of them, the better it will be for everyone.

Chuck Jones

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

Chuck Jones

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

Chuck Jones

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

Chuck Jones

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

Chuck Jones

#58. 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