I am not interested in slickness for the sake of slickness.

Disney had such a hold on the mind of America-they were Adolf Hitler. The whole country thought Disney was some sort of god and that animation was some sort of pure thing for children.

One of the best animated films I've seen come out of Disney was the Tarzan movie. I wasn't crazy about the story or the design on Tarzan's face, but the traditional animation was spectacular.

Most of the animated films I watched, the emotions are all prepackaged like canned music, the hand actions, the sighs.

Animation is tremendously resilient. Animation will recover, as art always recovers. There's always cycles of good art.

I am not interested in slickness for the sake of slickness.

Look what Disney's done to their animation department. There wasn't an animator in charge of their animation unit!

I miss animation very passionately. Not continuously, but every once in a while I would die to do another film.

Painting pictures didn't make me a lot of money. I have to eat.

I'm the first to admit that I can't be as good as Tolkien, and a movie can never be as good as Tolkien.

My movies continue to be found and be sold because there's something going on in them.

I animated 20 years at Terry Toons. It's important to know that animators like pizza and a raise once in a while, and you've got to treat them with love.

Film has to describe and show.

Sweetheart, I'm the biggest ripped-off cartoonist in the history of the world, and that's all I'm going to say.

I would like to have the original ending to my Lord of the Rings instead of the one they released. In my original cut I had the victory at Helm's Deep as the final sequence.

Too many of Disney animators, and a lot try to emulate Disney, are trying to hit what they call quality levels. They're boring mannerisms.

I thought I had the rights to The Lord of the Rings. I don't know how Jackson ended up with the rights.

As an artist, I want to interpret my feelings - not run across the street and ask what my mother thinks.

The rise of anime had to happen. If the Japanese could tell better American stories, it would go through the roof. They still tell stories which are very much oriental. I take my hat off to them.

Wizards was my homage to Tolkien in the American idiom. I had read Tolkien, understood Tolkien, and wanted to do a sort of fantasy for American kids, and that was Wizards.

They say I'm a revolutionary, but they're all wrong.

My good films were independent and my bad films were not.

Live action writers will give you a structure, but who the hell is talking about structure? Animation is closer to jazz than some kind of classical stage structure.

What's most important in animation is the emotions and the ideas being portrayed. I'm a great believer of energy and emotion.

I'm having the same problems today that I had when I first started, saying that outrageous adult animation works.

All the old great companies were run by guys who knew what an animator meant, and guys who knew how to draw. All the companies today are run by executives.

I draw what I feel, which is no more than doing my job.

You can't second-guess yourself as a filmmaker.

Cartooning at its best is a fine art. I'm a cartoonist who works in the medium of animation, which also allows me to paint my cartoons.

I had the X rating on my films. Now they do as much on The Simpsons as I got an X rating for Fritz the Cat.

Lord of the Rings made me realize that I'm not interested in doing anyone else's work.

Serious people are not easily distracted

Life is one long decay, no? There's a lot of beauty in it. Like the patina in an old city.

Beetles and butterflies are sometimes restricted to small areas. Each mountain in a range, and even the different zones of a mountain, may have its own peculiar species. But the house-fly seems to be everywhere. I wonder if any island in mid-ocean is flyless.

I'm not sure I'm quite ready to have someone be a prospector of jobs for me, because I believe there's some kind of destiny involved with meeting people... some things are just meant to happen.

Maybe my way of communicating through sign made me more in tune with my body and how it moved. Who knows? I just know when I saw a stage for the first time, I wanted to be on it.

It's like trying to listen to your favorite show with really bad noise disrupting the signal. All the while, loud children are screaming around you and throwing things.

I would like to get a good education, get married, and have kids.

I learned that if you bring black people together, you bring them together with a song. To this day, I don't understand how people think they can bring anybody together without a song.

I've never been a great enthusiast about how I look and I am very... when I was young I had a real anti-talent for inventing myself as unappealing - craven and unremarkable.

Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.

I don't see the point of doing an interview unless you're going to share the things you learn in life and the mistakes you make. So to admit that I'm extremely human and have done some dark things I don't think makes me unusual or unusually dark. I think it actually is the right thing to do, and I'd like to think it's the nice thing to do.

The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster.

Discussing how old you are is the temple of boredom.

I didn't picture myself as a movie actress. I began to think about it around college. I remember thinking, "Well somebody has to be in them," so maybe I could do that eventually. It's all been a surprise.

Create each day anew.

Great power which incites great envy hurls some men to destruction they are drowned in a long splendid stream of honors.

The things I do, I do from the heart and out of love and respect for our planet and all living things. And I draw my courage from my love for justice and truth, and I calm my fears by comforting those who are more scared than me. And I try to do my best to make the world a better place, one small action at a time, as good as I can.

My dad loves what I do and I support my parents financially because they didn't have a job that gave them a pension.