I can't do a film after having debated it. I am unable to do a film while discussing it with my team. I issue directives. I do not achieve it otherwise.

I never read reviews. I'm not interested. But I value a lot the reactions of the spectators.

Is someone different at age 18 or 60? I believe one stays the same.

I am an animator. I feel like I'm the manager of a animation cinema factory. I am not an executive. I'm rather like a foreman, like the boss of a team of craftsmen. That is the spirit of how I work.

When a man is shooting a handgun, it's just like he is shooting because that's his job, and he has no other choice. It's no good. When a girl is shooting a handgun, it's really something.

I can't do a film after having debated it. I am unable to do a film while discussing it with my team. I issue directives. I do not achieve it otherwise.

We live in an age when it is cheaper to buy the rights to movies than to make them.

All my films are all my children.

Animators can only draw from their own experiences of pain and shock and emotions.

Currently computer graphics are used a great deal, but it can be excessive.

Humans have both the urge to create and destroy.

I create women characters by watching the female staff at my studio. Half the staff are women.

I do all my work by storyboard, so as I draw the storyboard, the world gets more and more complex, and as a result, my North, South, East, West directions kind of shift and go off base, but it seems like my staff as well as the audience, doesn't quite realize that this has happened. Don't tell them about it.

I get inspiration from my everyday life.

I like underwater life.

I think Tokyo is going to sink under water soon. All those stupid high-rise buildings will sink and maybe all the traffic will be gone. And everything will be peaceful and quiet.

I think we should stop using nuclear power plants because it's an old system that we can't control.

I'd like more of the world go back to being wild.

I'm not a collector.

It seems like everything that we see perceived in the brain before we actually use our own eyes, that everything we see is coming through computers or machines and then is being input in our brain cells. So that really worries me.

It would be wonderful if I could see the end of civilization during my lifetime.

My process is thinking, thinking and thinking - thinking about my stories for a long time.

People in Japan have experienced many tsunamis and various earthquakes throughout the ages.

Plants exist in the weather and light rays that surround them - waving in the wind, shimmering in the sunlight. I am always puzzling over how to draw such things.

Sometimes I test myself saying, 'If I get a death sentence if I don't make this movie, would I still make this movie?'

To have a film where there's an evil figure and a good person fights against the evil figure and everything becomes a happy ending, that's one way to make a film. But then that means you have to draw, as an animator, the evil figure. And it's not very pleasant to draw evil figures.

Watching John Lasseter's films, I think I can understand better than anyone that what he's doing, is going straight ahead with his vision and working really hard to get that vision into film form. And I feel that my understanding this of him is my friendship towards him.

We get strength and encouragement from watching children.

But remember this Japanese boy airplanes are not tools for war. They are not for making mone. Airplanes are beautiful dreams. Engineers turn dreams into reality.

In this world of ours the sparrow must live like a hawk if he is to fly at all.

I believe nostalgia has many appearances and that it's not just the privilege of adults. I think children too can have nostalgia. It's one of mankind's most shared emotions. It's one of the things that makes us human. When you live, you lose things. It's a fact of life. So it's natural for everyone to have nostalgia.

In this world of ours, the sparrow must live like a hawk if he is to fly at all.

Life is a winking light in the darkness.

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.

One of the most interesting aspects of the film project was collaborating with so many people - directors, filmmakers, and writers - over a five-year period. I learned that there are two components to this.

The best thing I can think of would be to create a union between something as beautiful and powerful and wonderful as Hollywood films and a criticism of the status quo. That's my dream, to make such a German film.

If he didn't fall in love he would have never come back near the end of the film. Because, what man is going to dishonor himself so that he comes back in front of the man that took a woman away from him... and warns her to save her life?

Robert Altman's Nashville is my all-time favorite film because it covers all the bases - it's original, moving, and has something to say, but also funny and incredibly entertaining.

I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist.

I have a movie coming out called Spun, which will be at the Toronto Film Fest.