Quotes By Chuck Jones

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.

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

Anyone can negatively criticize - it is the cheapest of all comment because it requires not a modicum of the effort that suggestion requires.

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

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

There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is the willingness to think.

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

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

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

Mark Twain's Roughing It is a book that many people don't know about, but I highly recommend to anybody at any age.

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.

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

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

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

Once you have heard a strange audience burst into laughter at a film you directed, you realize what the word joy is all about.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Each character represented a trait that resides in me.

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

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

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.

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

Comedy is a very, very, very stringent business.

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

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.

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