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.

Cartooning at its best is a fine art. I'm a cartoonist who works in the medium of animation, which also allows me to paint my cartoons.

Art was my little private pleasure. Nobody had seen my art, not even my parents. Andy didn't know about it. My dream was to become a publisher, not an artist lost in New York.

There is no security on this earth. Only opportunity.

I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.

Oh, dear me, no. Then I should be known as that vampire with all the cats.

Oh, well, in Los Angeles everybody is an actor, or a producer, or a writer, or a director, or an agent, or... So everybody understands the hours.

Today was a difficult day. Tomorrow will be better

Cycling is such an endurance sport. I don't think it's the worst thing ever to start when you're in your twenties.

At the KFC there's, lot of black people there innit *laughs*

Sometimes, when a person is truly lost in this world, suffocating inside her private bubble where all she can hear is her own droning heartbeat, a touch can be enough.

When you're through learning, you're through.