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

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

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

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

As an artist, I want to interpret my feelings

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Abstract anger is great for rhetorical carrying on. You can go on endlessly about the post office, but it doesn't mean you're mad at your mailman.

If you want to be you, BE YOU!

If our elaborate and dominating bodies are given us to be denied at every turn, if our nature is always wrong and wicked, how ineffectual we are; like fishes not meant to swim.

I need, absolutely, to be alone.

In hindsight, I wish I had done more.

The freedoms that people have that flow from all civic institutions fundamentally come from the success of a market system.

We had 10 years after the Cold War to build a new world order and yet we squandered them. The United States cannot tolerate anyone acting independently. Every US president has to have a war.

When I was in retreat I just did my meditation sessions and, in-between, reading and things I had to do.

One truth discovered, one pang of regret at not being able to express it, is better than all the fluency and flippancy in the world.