Great art inspires great art.

The best stories infuse wonder.

If you want someone’s attention, whisper.

Drama is anticipation mingled with uncertainty.

The greatest story commandment is: Make me care.

Art is messy, art is chaos - so you need a system.

Don't give [the audience] four; give them two plus two.

A strong theme is always running through a well-told story.

Change is fundamental in story. If things go static, stories die.

I had never touched a computer in my life before I came to Pixar.

I've always felt you unearth story, like you're on an archeological dig.

Frankly, there isn't anyone you couldn't learn to love once you've heard their story.

Loneliness is, I think, people's biggest fear, whether they are conscious of it or not.

I never think about the audience. If someone gives me a marketing report, I throw it away.

There's always one sequence in every animated film that's the bane of every animator's existence.

That's what great art does - it inspires other artists to do great art, and that's what it should do.

And I'm not anti-sequel, but I just feel like there are very few ideas that are meant to be continued.

John [Lasseter] always said that he was Andy, and Joe [Ranft] and I were Sid, and I think that's true.

Most people know me at Pixar as the guy that doesn't like to do sequels or very reluctant to do sequels.

Even as a kid I was never the generator of humor, but I always knew who was funny, who to hang out with.

Well, I have no problem with 3-D but I don't think it's necessarily a blanket requirement for every film.

No one's going to see my mistakes; I just need the safety of these mistakes to lead me to the right answers.

I'm twice as funny, I'm twice as smart, I'm twice as whatever when I'm around other people that challenge me.

The happiest moments of my childhood were when my toys broke, because then I could destroy them with impunity.

I'm a family man, I have kids, and I go to the movies. And I'm just going to make the kind of movie I want to see.

A major threshold is passed when you mature enough to acknowledge what drives you, and to take the wheel and steer it.

I almost feel like it's an obligation to not further the status quo if you become somebody with influence and exposure.

In fact, I don't think I'll ever make anything that will feel as divinely dropped in my lap as the opening of 'Wall-E.'

Sadly, my hobby is what I do for work, so I don't go off and go fishing. I go home and veg, and then I go back to work.

In storytelling, the audience actually wants to work for their meal, they just don't want to know that they're doing it.

I'm also a huge cinephile, and I have witnessed that to honor the book literally word-for-word never makes a good movie.

Well, executive producer can mean anything in the world of Hollywood, sadly. It can be a bought title in many instances.

The way Pixar has always worked is that we think of an idea and then we make it. We don't develop lots of ideas and then pick one.

I'm still craving approval from my parents. It took a lot of success for me to realize it was never coming. It's just not in their nature.

There's nothing that you like in this world that wasn't influenced by a bunch of key things; nothing came completely clean out of a vacuum.

If you don't think a film looks good then that is just a reflection of how bad the artist was that was using the paint that is really good.

If you're trying to do multiple agendas, you'll confuse yourself as a storyteller. If you have one purpose, everything else will fall into place.

There are so many times and places in history in our world that I just don't know anything about, and when I learn about them they're always fascinating.

I think you could go back to any filmmaker or musician or artist, and look at what their input was in their formative years, and you could trace all the lines.

I was that kind of kid that was going to the movies every weekend, I couldnt get enough of the movies, and now I get to make them. So I kind of have a one-track mind.

I mean, frankly, I'm not speaking as a representative of Disney or Pixar, I'm speaking as just myself as a filmmaker: I don't go into anything that often thinking about a sequel.

The thing about working at Pixar is that everyone around you is smarter and funnier and cleverer than you and they all think the same about everyone else. Its a nice problem to have.

The thing about working at Pixar is that everyone around you is smarter and funnier and cleverer than you and they all think the same about everyone else. It's a nice problem to have.

Use what you know. Draw from it. It doesnt always mean plot or fact. It means capturing a truth from your experiencing it, expressing values you personally feel deep down in your core.

We're all going to keep telling love stories, we're all going to tell hero stories. It's all a question of what your own thumbprint, your own DNA, is, and what it brings to the table that makes it unique.

I think in the future we might see things arrive the way Prince announces a concert where a few days before the show he announces it and tickets just go up. You might see that with movies and other things.

Being a sci-fi geek myself and going to movies all my life, I came to the conclusion that there were really two camps of how robots have been designed. It's either the tin man, which is a human with metal skin, or it's an R2D2.

I've been a fan of movies longer than anything else. One thing I learned a long time ago is that you can't translate a book literally to the screen. It won't work because it's a different medium. And it would be the same in reverse.

There's a mercurial nature, but more of a mysterious nature to women that I think is what makes them so attractive. And I think that that's what I love: Guys never seem to know when they've come too close and crossed the line, and then the temper comes.

Working at Pixar you learn the really honest, hard way of making a great movie, which is to surround yourself with people who are much smarter than you, much more talented than you, and incite constructive criticism; you'll get a much better movie out of it.

Share This Page