Quotes By Joseph Barbera

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

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

My last days at MGM were like the fall of the Roman Empire in fast motion.

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

When animators weren't sleeping, they were drinking.

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

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

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

Friends don't necessarily made good business or creative partners.

Despite the rejection, and in violation of all the rules, I came back year after year.

Among the great glories of the MGM lot were the vast outdoor sets that had been constructed over the years.

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

I first pitched the idea of doing a series of cartoons based on Bible stories. They didn't much like it.

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.

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

You keep pitching. Most of the pitches run wild. A few are caught.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

After I had done a handful of cartoons I was satisfied with, I started submitting them to the magazines.

There is no law that says a man who earned a hundred million dollars in his first half-dozen years on the job has to be a decent human being, but Mike Eisner is that and more.

My marriage had been impulsive. That marriage should have been short-lived instead of the 23 years it spanned.

Ted Turner sailed into the meeting, and I mean sailed. He holds himself as if he were at the helm of his sailboat, in the process of winning the race.

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

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.

I don't know that I spent any more time alone than any other kid, but being by myself never bothered me.

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