I think the people who are making Christmas-themed movies today feel that people are more cynical about Christmas. There's more of an edge.

I had the great good fortune to interview Peggy Lee. Her memories of working with Walt Disney and his team were warm and upbeat.

A Christmas Carol is such a fool-proof story you can't louse it up.

I teach at USC. I have a big class of 360 kids, only about a fifth of whom are film majors. I don't just show the Hollywood blockbusters. I show independent films, foreign films, documentaries.

I think the people who are making Christmas-themed movies today feel that people are more cynical about Christmas. There's more of an edge.

Movie theaters still exist in spite of all of the alternatives that are available, video and video-on-demand and DVD and streaming video and all of these things.

I'm a lifelong Disney nut.

I think people in Hollywood are afraid of sentiment because they think audiences will reject it.

Shakespeare wrote great plays that we're still watching all these years later. Charlie Chaplin made great comedies and they are still as funny today as they ever were.

Dumbo... makes me cry. Every single time and in the exact same spot. I just have a special affection for Dumbo.

The last person to stand still and repeat himself was Walt Disney. He refused to repeat himself. So to think that he'd be making the same kind of film in the year 2001 that he made in 1941 is absurd.

Audiences deserve better.

Everyone is looking for the sure thing. They are looking to hedge their bet. They think the way to do that is to go with a proven quantity, a remake of something you have already seen. That is their mindset.

When Tim Allen made The Santa Clause, I thought that was a delightful film. It took a modern sensibility but layered onto it a kind of sentiment.

Polar Express is not an attempt to do animation. It is a technology-based film.

Quality survives.

While it was occasionally done here or there, nobody else had a figurehead like Walt doing it. Jack Warner wasn't on TV. Walt was the boss, but he had a real public profile and he used it to his advantage. And he became a household face.

Hollywood executives believe that money is both the be-all and end-all to the moviemaking process.

NBC anchor Brian Williams is a standup comic in disguise.

Television is what made It's a Wonderful Life the classic it is today.

Beauty and the Beast became the first animated feature ever nominated for best picture.

If I were less than honest as a critic, I think people would spot that right away, and it would destroy my credibility.

Timing in life is everything.

Los Angeles has the greatest concentration of surviving movie palaces in the United States, yet most residents have never been inside one of them.

Television is what made Its a Wonderful Life the classic it is today.

I get a little behind during Lent, but it comes out even at Christmas.

If you pray enough for things, I am proof that they can happen. I feel like a kid on Christmas day now, every day. It's something I have wanted for a long time and I am as happy as anyone to be here. It is great to be back at my first love.

When I was 12, all I wanted for Christmas was a trampoline or a four-wheeler. I ended up getting both presents for Christmas.

Christmas renews our youth by stirring our wonder. The capacity for wonder has been called our most pregnant human faculty, for in it are born our art, our science, our religion.

Next to a circus there ain't nothing that packs up and tears out faster than the Christmas spirit.

Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childhood days, recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth, and transport the traveler back to his own fireside and quiet home!

From a commercial point of view, if Christmas did not exist it would be necessary to invent it.

Christmas albums are not something you do frequently.

Fantastic! Right in the middle of that long stretch between Christmas and Spring Break, your coats are getting dirty, everything's dark, dingy - what a great time for a movie!

But Tammy Faye calls me, and Ron Jeremy calls me, Erik Estrada sends me a Christmas card every year.

Christmas to a child is the first terrible proof that to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.

There's been a concerted effort to steal Christmas.

I have a musical called Goodbye and Good Luck, based on a Grace Paley short story. I also have King Island Christmas, and there are 20 different productions of it this year.

I intend to keep writing Christmas songs. There's still a lot more about Christmas that can be captured and feel like old-time Christmas. A lot of the traditions haven't been explained in song.

I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.

Christmas... is not an external event at all, but a piece of one's home that one carries in one's heart.

Dad bought me a toy drum one Christmas, and I eventually destroyed it. I wanted a real drum and he bought me a snare drum. Dad continued to buy me one drum after the other.

To understand this Christmas record, you have to understand our ministry.

Christmas carols always brought tears to my eyes. I also cry at weddings. I should have cried at a couple of my own.

Please to put a nickel, please to put a dime. How petitions trickle in at Christmas time!

Chum was a British boy's weekly which, at the end of the year was bound into a single huge book; and the following Christmas parents bought it as Christmas presents for male children.

Godot is whatever it is in life that you are waiting for: 'I'm waiting to win the lottery. I'm waiting to fall in love'. For me, as a child, it was Christmas. At least that eventually came.

I can't tell you how scary it can be walking onto a movie and suddenly joining this family, it's like going to somebody else's Christmas dinner, everyone knows everyone, and you're there and you're not quite sure what you're supposed to be doing.

We should declare war on North Vietnam. We could pave the whole country and put parking strips on it, and still be home by Christmas.