Chuck Jones Quotes

16 Sourced Quotes

Anyone can say 'no'. It is the first word a child learns and often the
first word he speaks. It is a cheap word because it requires no
explanation, and many men and women have acquired a reputation for
intelligence who know only this word and have used it in place of
thought on every occasion.

Chuck Jones
When the coyote falls, he gets up and brushes himself off; it's preservation of dignity. He's humiliated, and it worries him when he ends up looking like an accordion. A coyote isn't much, but it's better than being an accordion.

Chuck Jones
The two most important people in animation are Winsor McCay and Walt Disney, and I'm not sure which should go first.

Chuck Jones
If you make a fool of yourself in front of a cat, he will sneer at you, if you are sober; he will leave the room if you are drunk. If you make a fool of yourself in front a dog, he will make a fool of himself, too.

Chuck Jones
Humiliation and indifference, these are conditions every one of us finds unbearable–this is why the Coyote when falling is more concerned with the audience's opinion of him than he is with the inevitable result of too much gravity.

Chuck Jones
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.

Chuck Jones
Everything on Saturday morning [cartoons] moves alike—that's one of the reasons it's not animation. The drawings are different, but everybody acts the same way, their feet move the same way, and everybody runs the same way. It doesn't matter whether it's an alligator or a man or a baby or anything, they all move the same.

Chuck Jones
A comedian is not a person who opens a funny door — he's the person who opens a door funny.

Chuck Jones
The best way, of course, to understand the animator is to see that he parallels the actor. He has the same responsibility a fine actor has. [...] Even the people who write about animation just don't seem to understand that when you have a drawing, you don't have a character. [...] "This is the first Bugs Bunny" has no meaning. It's how Bugs came to stand and move and act, and what his feelings were, and his thoughts, and what kind of personality he was. That developed over a period of time. And you need fine animators to do that.

Chuck Jones
Eschew the ordinary, disdain the commonplace. If you have a single-minded need for something, let it be the unusual, the esoteric, the bizarre, the unexpected.

Chuck Jones
I'm still astonished that somebody would offer me a job and pay me to do what I wanted to do.

Chuck Jones
I started reading when I was about three, a little over three.

Chuck Jones
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.

Chuck Jones
Well, directing is doing the key drawings, not the key animation, mind you.

Chuck Jones
An idea has no worth at all without believable characters to implement it; a plot without characters is like a tennis court without players. Daffy Duck is to a Buck Rogers story what John McEnroe was to tennis. Personality. That is the key, the drum, the fife. Forget the plot.

Chuck Jones
Mark Twain's Roughing It is a book that many people don't know about, but I highly recommend to anybody at any age.

Chuck Jones