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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Comedy is a very, very, very stringent business.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity.

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

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

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

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

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.

Each character represented a trait that resides in me.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

Animation means to invoke life, not to imitate it.

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

A comedian is not a person who opens a funny door hes the person who opens a door funny.

The only time a wife listens to her husband is when hes asleep.

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

My best film composing experience was with Elia Kazan.

I was lucky enough to occasionally break out of that racist situation that prevails in the Hollywood film production community. But it was racist then and it will always be that way. It will never be otherwise.

'Batman' took 10 months to film, and by the time I stopped working on it, it took a long time before my English accent came out again. I was actually having to try for it.

Luck is everything... My good luck in life was to be a really frightened person. I'm fortunate to be a coward, to have a low threshold of fear, because a hero couldn't make a good suspense film.

I still feel that a movie has to attempt to say something - even if it fails miserably. But I've sort of given up on believing that I'm going to change the world with every film I choose to act in.

It's the difficulty we had with Mr. Bean, actually, when it went from TV to film. You certainly discover that you need to explain more about a character.

To make a documentary is one thing, to make a feature film is quite another.

I mean when the play was on in New York I was starting to get film offers coming through, and since the film's come out I get offered more than I used to, but it happens incrementally.

I think it would be very boring dramatically to have a film where everybody was a lawyer or doctor and had no faults. To me, the most important thing is to be truthful.

I like doing them and they're ridiculous and the actors can improvise a lot, and they don't have to be really realistic characters that hit a very specific tone as in a feature film. They're really fun, I want to make more of them definitely.