Quotes by Chuck Jones

• Jackie Gleason said that comedy is the most exacting form of dramatic art, because it has an instant critic: laughter.
• Once you have heard a strange audience burst into laughter at a film you directed, you realize what the word joy is all about.
• Painting does what we cannot do - it brings a three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional plane.
• 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.
• The Coyote is limited, as Bugs is limited, by his anatomy.
• The older I get, the more individuality I find in animals and the less I find in humans.
• The only time a wife listens to her husband is when he's asleep.
• In 1918, when I was 6 or 7 years old, radio was just coming into use in the Great War.
• 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.
• There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is the willingness to think.
• 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.
• We must not confuse distortion with innovation; distortion is useless change, art is beneficial change.
• Well, directing is doing the key drawings, not the key animation, mind you.
• When critics sit in judgment it is hard to tell where justice leaves off and vengeance begins.
• The only thing an adult can give a child is time.
• 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.
• A lion's work hours are only when he's hungry; once he's satisfied, the predator and prey live peacefully together.
• Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity.
• 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.
• Comedy is unusual people in real situations; farce is real people in unusual situations.
• If you want a midget to look like a baby, don't put a cigar in his mouth.
• Each character represented a trait that resides in me.
• Early experiences convinced me that animals can and do have quite distinct personalities.
• Fog and smog should not be confused and are easily separated by color.
• 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.
• 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.
• I started reading when I was about three, a little over three.
• I'm still astonished that somebody would offer me a job and pay me to do what I wanted to do.
• If you start with character, you probably will end up with good drawings.
• Comedy is a very, very, very stringent business.