As you become acquainted with a character you are creating, you add parts of yourself that are pertinent to that character.
Each character represented a trait that resides in me.
Fog and smog should not be confused and are easily separated by color.
Early experiences convinced me that animals can and do have quite distinct personalities.
Painting does what we cannot do – it brings a three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional plane.
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.
Often Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity.
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.
Dell is to a degree in the penalty box because expectations and probable results have gotten ratcheted down.
I started reading when I was about three, a little over three.
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.
The weatherman is not only blamed for his failure to foretell, he is blamed for the weather itself.
Artists don’t need criticism, artists need love.
Eschew the ordinary, disdain the commonplace.
In 1918, when I was 6 or 7 years old, radio was just coming into use in the Great War.
Fog and smog should not be confused and are easily separated by color. Fog is about the color of the insides of an old split wet summer cottage mattress; smog is the color and consistency of a wet potato chip soaked in a motorman’s glove.
If you were to draw Bugs, the easiest way is to learn how to draw a carrot and then hook a rabbit onto it.
Anyone can negatively criticize – it is the cheapest of all comment because it requires not a modicum of the effort that suggestion requires.
When a young artist asked me for advice on drawing the human foot, I told him, ‘The first thing you must learn is how to take your shoe off, and then how to take your sock off, then prop your leg up carefully on your other knee, take a piece of paper, and draw your foot.’
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.