Top 60 John Lasseter Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Quality is the best business plan.”

— John Lasseter

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2. “The art challenges the technology, and the technology inspires the art.”

— John Lasseter

3. “The more we all help each other, the more we all benefit. So go out there. Help others.”

— John Lasseter

4. “If you can think about it, you can create it.”

— John Lasseter

5. “I have this saying. Quality is the best business plan. I believe so strongly in that.”

— John Lasseter

6. “Computers don’t create computer animation any more than a pencil creates pencil animation. What creates computer animation is the artist.”

— John Lasseter

7. “Your voice is worthwhile. Have faith in it.”

— John Lasseter

8. “Every single Pixar film, at one time or another, has been the worst movie ever put on film. But we know. We trust our process. We don’t get scared and say, ‘Oh, no, this film isn’t working.’”

— John Lasseter

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9. “You can achieve all the things you want to do, but it’s much better to do it with loved ones around you; family and friends, people that you care about that can help you on the way and can celebrate you, and you can enjoy the journey.”

— John Lasseter

10. “I realized that people make cartoons for a living. It had never dawned on me that you could do this as a career.”

— John Lasseter

11. “The spirit of Route 66 is in the details: every scratch on a fender, every curl of paint on a weathered billboard, every blade of grass growing up through a cracked street.”

— John Lasseter

12. “I’ve got Disney blood running through my veins.”

— John Lasseter

13. “It’s so important to create in your own voice, to hold onto what makes you unique, and have faith in your vision.”

— John Lasseter

14. “A good part of my leadership skills is crafted from learning from experiences early in my career that were not positive experiences.”

— John Lasseter

15. “This is what I always tell my filmmakers-you have to do tons of research, because you don’t know where the inspiration is going come from.”

— John Lasseter

16. “You cannot base a whole movie on just the imagery alone. It has to be the story and the characters.”

— John Lasseter

17. “I love movies that make me cry, because they’re tapping into a real emotion in me, and I always think afterwards: how did they do that?”

— John Lasseter

18. “People who get into animation tend to be kids. We don’t have to grow up. But also, animators are great observers, and there’s this childlike wonder and interest in the world, the observation of little things that happen in life.”

— John Lasseter

19. “There’s never a wrong idea. You just keep throwing stuff out and inevitably there are elements of different things that inspire a character or environment.”

— John Lasseter

20. “What’s fun about the story development at Pixar is it’s a journey. You don’t just write a script and then that’s the movie you make. It’s just constant evolution and being open to that and that collaboration with the voice actors and with the artists and animators at Pixar.”

— John Lasseter

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21. “When you make these films, they become like your children. But at a certain point, they don’t belong to you anymore; they belong to the world.”

— John Lasseter

22. “Slice open one of my veins and cartoons will pour out; open another vein and you’ll get a flood of motor oil.”

— John Lasseter

23. “Humor is the easiest to achieve; the ‘heart’ is always the toughest, because you can’t tell people to feel a certain way.”

— John Lasseter

24. “We make the kind of movies we like to watch. I love to laugh. I love to be amazed by how beautiful it is. But I also love to be moved to tears. There’s lots of heart in our films.”

— John Lasseter

25. “You need others. Too often people think that being unique means being isolated, and being a great artist means coming up with genius ideas out of nowhere. Nothing could be farther from the truth.”

— John Lasseter

26. “I believe in research you cannot do enough research; believability comes out of what’s real.”

— John Lasseter

27. “The hardest thing to get is true emotion. I always believe you need to earn that with the audience. You can’t just tell them ok, be sad now. Humor, you can add. Even to the last minute you can be adding little bits of humor. But the true earned emotion is something that you really have to craft.”

— John Lasseter

28. “I worry about kids today not having time to build a tree house or ride a bike or go fishing. I worry that life is getting faster and faster.”

— John Lasseter

29. “People have a real love of looking at small worlds – something inside them is innately attracted to that ‘miniature’ realm.”

— John Lasseter

30. “Every animator is really an actor performing in slow motion, living the character a drawing at a time.”

— John Lasseter

31. “To take full advantage of computer animation, you have to pay as much attention to the believable as you do the unbelievable.”

— John Lasseter

32. “Pixar films are not realistic. They are believable for the worlds we are creating.”

— John Lasseter

33. “In computer animation, every detail has to be thought out, designed, modeled, shaded, placed and lit. The more you add, the more computer memory you need.”

— John Lasseter

34. “Soon I learned that the worse the puns and jokes, the funnier they could be, if you knew how to deliver them.”

— John Lasseter

35. “Toys are put on this Earth to be played with by a child.”

— John Lasseter

36. “Every young person gets so excited about new software packages and new technology.”

— John Lasseter

37. “A gem of a short film has a sense of pure joy in animation that is different from anything you see in a feature film.”

— John Lasseter

38. “Sunday, for me, is all about being home with the family with no plans.”

— John Lasseter

39. “Animation is the one type of movie that really does play for the entire audience. Our challenge is to make stories that connect for kids and adults.”

— John Lasseter

40. “My mother was a high school arts teacher, so I was always surrounded by the arts.”

— John Lasseter

41. “I believe in the nobility of entertaining people and I take great, great pride that people are willing to give me two or three hours of their busy lives.”

— John Lasseter

42. “To me, I would much rather be part of a healthy industry than being the only player in a dead industry. There are so many great artists out there. And the goal is to make great movies, you know? So to be successful, quality is the best business plan as I always say.”

— John Lasseter

43. “You make a movie to entertain audiences. That’s why you make a movie. The product sales is because people love the characters, and to me, that is a testament to how our movie has become so ingrained in family’s homes all around the world and that’s why I make movies.”

— John Lasseter

44. “Sure, they were simple desk lamps with only a minimal amount of movement, but you could immediately tell that Luxo Jr. was a baby, and that the big one was his mother. In that short little film, computer animation went from a novelty to a serious tool for filmmaking.”

— John Lasseter

45. “One of the big technical advances that’s really great looking is the water.”

— John Lasseter

46. “Never in the history of cinema has a medium entertained an audience. It’s what you do with the medium.”

— John Lasseter

47. “I love the villains who are really hyper-smart. When at the end of the movie you find out what they were about, and it makes absolutely perfect sense from their point of view.”

— John Lasseter

48. “I’m the biggest fan of animation. I love the history of animation, I know it well.”

— John Lasseter

49. “There is such amazing talent at Disney. My job is 100% creative, and I am very excited to creatively lead them.”

— John Lasseter

50. “One of the fun things about play is making up stories...”

— John Lasseter

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