Top 50 Chuck Jones Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “An animator is an actor with a pencil.”

— Chuck Jones

Featured in: Quotes About Actors

2. “Every artist has thousands of bad drawings in them and the only way to get rid of them is to draw them out.”

— Chuck Jones

3. “You can’t force inspiration. It’s like trying to catch a butterfly with a hoop but no net. If you keep your mind open and receptive, though, one day a butterfly will land on your finger.”

— Chuck Jones

4. “Animation isn’t the illusion of life; it is life.”

— Chuck Jones

5. “You’ve got a million bad drawings in you; you better get started.”

— Chuck Jones

6. “All worthwhile endeavors are 90% work and 10% love, and only the love should show.”

— Chuck Jones

7. “Bugs is who we want to be. Daffy is who we are.”

— Chuck Jones

8. “The road is better than the end.”

— Chuck Jones

9. “Comedy is unusual people in real situations; farce is real people in unusual situations.”

— Chuck Jones

10. “Anyone can negatively criticize – it is the cheapest of all comment because it requires not a modicum of the effort that suggestion requires.”

— Chuck Jones

11. “Fog and smog should not be confused and are easily separated by color. Fog is about the color of the insides of an old split wet summer cottage mattress; smog is the color and consistency of a wet potato chip soaked in a motorman’s glove.”

— Chuck Jones

12. “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

13. “When a young artist asked me for advice on drawing the human foot, I told him, ‘The first thing you must learn is how to take your shoe off, and then how to take your sock off, then prop your leg up carefully on your other knee, take a piece of paper, and draw your foot.’”

— Chuck Jones

14. “The weatherman is not only blamed for his failure to foretell, he is blamed for the weather itself.”

— Chuck Jones

15. “Jackie Gleason said that comedy is the most exacting form of dramatic art, because it has an instant critic: laughter.”

— Chuck Jones

16. “A comedian is not a person who opens a funny door – he’s the person who opens a door funny.”

— Chuck Jones

17. “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.”

— Chuck Jones

18. “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

19. “Often Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity.”

— Chuck Jones

20. “You do not ‘suffer’ if you decide ‘that’s the way it is’ rather than ‘why is it this way?’”

— Chuck Jones

21. “If you start with character, you probably will end up with good drawings.”

— Chuck Jones

22. “As you become acquainted with a character you are creating, you add parts of yourself that are pertinent to that character.”

— Chuck Jones

23. “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.”

— Chuck Jones

24. “Animation means to invoke life, not to imitate it.”

— Chuck Jones

25. “A lion’s work hours are only when he’s hungry; once he’s satisfied, the predator and prey live peacefully together.”

— Chuck Jones

26. “All of you here have one hundred thousand bad drawings in you. The sooner you get rid of them, the better it will be for everyone.”

— Chuck Jones

27. “Censorship, I believe, is the most dangerous enemy to all human communication, and piety of intention is probably the most dangerous, the most virulent and the most self-satisfying.”

— Chuck Jones

28. “The rules are simple. Take your work, but never yourself, seriously. Pour in the love and whatever skill you have, and it will come out.”

— Chuck Jones

29. “Fog and smog should not be confused and are easily separated by color.”

— Chuck Jones

30. “The only time a wife listens to her husband is when he’s asleep.”

— Chuck Jones

31. “The older I get, the more individuality I find in animals and the less I find in humans.”

— Chuck Jones

32. “Each character represented a trait that resides in me.”

— Chuck Jones

33. “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

34. “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

35. “Eschew the ordinary, disdain the commonplace.”

— Chuck Jones

36. “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.”

— Chuck Jones

37. “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

38. “We must not confuse distortion with innovation; distortion is useless change, art is beneficial change.”

— Chuck Jones

39. “Once you have heard a strange audience burst into laughter at a film you directed, you realize what the word joy is all about.”

— Chuck Jones

40. “Dell is to a degree in the penalty box because expectations and probable results have gotten ratcheted down.”

— Chuck Jones

41. “If you want a midget to look like a baby, don’t put a cigar in his mouth.”

— Chuck Jones

42. “When critics sit in judgment it is hard to tell where justice leaves off and vengeance begins.”

— Chuck Jones

43. “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

44. “If you were to draw Bugs, the easiest way is to learn how to draw a carrot and then hook a rabbit onto it.”

— Chuck Jones

45. “There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is the willingness to think.”

— Chuck Jones

46. “Artists don’t need criticism, artists need love.”

— Chuck Jones

47. “You have a coyote inside you and you have to get it out.”

— Chuck Jones

48. “In 1918, when I was 6 or 7 years old, radio was just coming into use in the Great War.”

— Chuck Jones

49. “I started reading when I was about three, a little over three.”

— Chuck Jones

50. “In timing a film, we used to assume that sneaks move slowly. This was great for animators-thirty-six to forty-eight drawings for a single step-but it was sheer hell for the pace of the picture. So the rapid tiptoe was invented.”

— Chuck Jones