Caroll Spinney Quotes

#1. Most people don't hold a job for 45 years. They pass on or want to retire. I don't want to retire. My real goal is to do 50 years on 'Sesame Street,' and I only got 4-and-a-half years to go.

Caroll Spinney

#2. Each day I'd wake up to a stream of strangers' most important life questions and concerns. It was like knowing the plots to countless movies but never being able to see the ending.

Greg Dybec

#3. I know I don't own Big Bird, but I own his soul, I feel.

Caroll Spinney

#4. It was starting to get impatient. A hedgehog hopping irritably on its hind legs is a tragic sight.

T. Kingfisher

#5. I found out animation is incredibly boring. You draw and draw and draw, and it's only a few seconds done in a week.

Caroll Spinney

#6. I think there's an awful lot of me in Big Bird, but Oscar is pretty much - I think I know how he thinks because he thinks exactly the opposite of what I think is a good way to be.

Caroll Spinney

#7. Big Bird went through his very human kind of struggles as a child. No other children's character has been that complete and detailed.

Caroll Spinney

#8. The shared secret of our second lives hangs between us, not like a weight, but like a lifeline.

Victoria Schwab

#9. I see no reason to quit. I can't imagine walking away from being Big Bird. I mean, that's an awfully good job that there's not too many of them. So I just want to keep doing it till I can't do it anymore.

Caroll Spinney

#10. I was called such names as a kid. Being the smallest boy in the class with a name like Caroll. I remember going home and saying to my mom, 'What were you thinking?'

Caroll Spinney

#11. You can't do better than that.

Jack White

#12. America knows nothing of food, love, or art.

Isadora Duncan

#13. We can never know what might have been but what is to come is another matter entirely

C.S. Lewis

#14. I've played Big Bird for over half my life, and now I'm in my 80s. It does feel older than 79. Someone said it's just a number, and I said, 'No, I genuinely feel older.'

Caroll Spinney

#15. I never left you; I never will leave you. While life lasts, and beyond, I am here.

Marion Zimmer Bradley

#16. I was suffering a divorce, and I was very unhappy because my children were very young. It hit me when a woman, a fan, was chatting with me. She was pleased to meet Big Bird because her children liked him and liked the show, but she didn't know that my face was streamed with tears.

Caroll Spinney

#17. I have a strong memory of my early childhood. I can remember life before I was two. I remember being toilet-trained like it was last week - and it wasn't last week.

Caroll Spinney

#18. You can exaggerate with puppets. You're not trying to look like real people. The way the Muppets are designed is really appealing. Puppets are best if they're exaggerated creatures.

Caroll Spinney

#19. I've learned to say, 'I'm a friend of Big Bird. He even taught me how to sound like him.'

Caroll Spinney

#20. The other puppeteers are really good, often when they are singing together, they go left, right, left ... But if they are all moving to the left, I'm moving to the right. Big Bird and Oscar, that's okay, because they are individuals anyway.

Caroll Spinney

#21. Big Bird is based on what I learned as a child.

Caroll Spinney

#22. What, then, is the true Gospel of consistency? Change. Who is the really consistent man? The man who changes. Since change is the law of his being, he cannot be consistent if he stick in a rut.

Mark Twain

#23. No matter how great you are, the next great one is already sitting there waiting to take your place.

Joe Theismann

#24. When I was eight, I bought my first puppet. It was a monkey, and I paid five cents for it. I collected some scrap wood and built myself a puppet theatre. I made 32 cents with my first show, which I thought was pretty good, and that's when I knew I would be a puppeteer when I grew up.

Caroll Spinney

#25. As an actress, you know there are limitations on what you can do creatively.

Michelle Yeoh

#26. I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever.

Oscar Wilde

#27. You are the home I point to that lives in my chest.

Buddy Wakefield

#28. Anger is preverbal, so, by the time you're using words to express an angry feeling, you're already imposing loads of structure on that primal experience.

John Darnielle

#29. It's easy for people to come in when they think you're in a hot moment of your life, but it's really nice also for people who believe in your work for the long term and are there not when something hip's happening at that moment.

Patricia Arquette

#30. Jim [Henson] had written letters to his five children to be opened only after his death. Brian read from his. Jim wrote, 'Be good to each other. Love and forgive everybody.' I remembered Jim telling me that he never wasted energy on hating anybody; he had too much thinking to do.

Caroll Spinney