Hyperbole is something I'd better avoid.

In advertising, I was frustrated by having to deal with the client. It was the only time I really worked in a proper office, and I didn't like it-simple as that.

It was lights, camera, inaction.

Literally overnight, I became an animator... and one that was well-known.

I was born in 1940 in Minnesota and grew up in the country... dirt roads, swamps, lakes, woods.

People used to think we just faked all that stuff... it was all written, rehearsed. The fact that it looks as cobbled together as it does is just that we weren't very good.

I was doing political cartoons and getting angry to the point where I felt I was going to have to start making and throwing bombs. I thought I was probably a better cartoonist than a bomb maker.

We did Holy Grail, and I got my name up there as one of the directors. After that, I started moving more and more down the line I wanted to, which was making movies.

They make Spy Kids, they make Scream, they make A Scary Movie. This doesn't do that, so it could be a very bad marriage. I'm trying to keep this potential nightmare quiet because we're just finishing editing.

There was a perverse side of me, with things like Van Helsing coming out. I didn't want to go down that route.

Hyperbole is something I'd better avoid.

At the first screening, there were a lot of areas that we went around and around about. Then we had our second screening. It played better. It's almost a reasonable length film now!

John Cleese was with a group called Cambridge Circus, who had come to New York, and we became friends. Years later that produced a certain team effort.

There are moments when television systems are young and haven't formed properly, and there's room for lots of original stuff. Then things become more and more top-heavy with executives who are trying to guarantee the success of things.

I got my head bashed in at a demonstration against the Vietnam War. Police were losing control because they were up against a world they really didn't understand.

Actually, I began to think that maybe there is a god, after all. Or maybe it's a different one. The old one got fired.

It's been interesting how kids have had hardly any problems watching it, but adults have more trouble. This happened way back even with Jabberwocky and Time Bandits.

I was getting frustrated with America. It's interesting how as simple a thing as, like, letting your hair grow longer changed in the world in those days.

You get trapped by stories. Though I've got this reputation for being out of control, it's not true, it just happens to be a more interesting story than the truth.

I keep referring to them in the plural but all I'm dealing with is Bob. I don't know where Harvey fits in the equation. He was very present at the beginning, winding his brother up. I don't know where he is now.

We took up the offer with the BBC, and that was Monty Python's Flying Circus. I didn't have to submit my ideas to the group. I used to turn up on the days we recorded with a can of film under my arm, and in it went.

It's 85 million dollars and they got to be really careful because they are going to need me.

The whole point of animation to me is to tell a story, make a joke, express an idea. The technique itself doesn't really matter. Whatever works is the thing to use.

You know the hardest thing to do in hollywood is burn bridges. There is usually some sucker who still likes me. There is usually some sucker who will still work with me.

A lot of the time the film chooses me. I'll be working and I'll get a call from my agent and I'll get the script and then tell him what I think.

Every Indian outbreak that I have ever known has resulted from broken promises and broken treaties by the government.

There is an infinite difference between a little wrong and just right, between fairly good and the best, between mediocrity and superiority.

By climbing a steeper road, the value and appreciation Delaware State students took and continue to take from their education and their experiences is just as great, if not greater, than students attending ivy league schools.

For your songs to connect with people, they've got to mean something to you.

A photographer without a magazine behind him is like a farmer without fields.

In the time it takes American literary titan William H. Gass to write a novel, other artists have been born, completed their life's work and died. That may be an exaggeration, but only a slight one.

It took me a long time to understand the relationship between ideas and between objective facts. But after I clearly understood this relationship, I didn't fool around with other wild ideas. That is one of the main reasons why I just make my scheme as simple as possible.

The best way not to encounter America's health care system is not to have to encounter it.

My earliest attempts at writing were when I was seven. I would sit at the piano and transcribe the songs I heard on the radio. I'd change little things in the music and write different lyrics.

In the clashes between ignorance and intelligence, ignorance is generally the aggressor.

Keep cool and you command everybody.

Dartmouth is a small school with high-caliber teaching. Our classes were all taught by professors, not teaching assistants. I felt like that was a school where I could make a big splash. The opportunities would be grander and more robust for me there than at a school with 40,000 students.

Basically, my mother couldn't hold a tune and when I was a baby, a rather tactless baby, I would ask her not to sing... you can't get to sleep if someone is singing off key nearby.

The best diet is the one that you dont know you are on.

Everyone archetypally is a parent to future generations.

I am not the most eloquent guy in the world.

It is always a great honor to be the driver of your own car to be the boss of your own fate

There is a misleading, unwritten rule that states if a quote giving advice comes from someone famous, very old, or Greek, then it must be good advice.

When people hurt you over and over think of them like sandpaper. They may scratch and hurt you a bit but in the end you end up polished and they end up useless.

I love working with PETA.

The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far reaching consequence of submission to authority.

The reason we race isn’t so much to beat each other but to be with each other.

Online advertising works, although it lands especially on search engines like Google and Yahoo. They achieve much higher revenues online than the websites of publishing companies.