Artist Quotes

My father was something of a rainbow-chaser.

Later, my father died up in Marysville. So, my mother and I got in the car and came down to Hollywood.

It wasn't a problem for me drawing humans although I had originally come to the studio with the idea that what I had to offer them was my knowledge in the drawing of animals.

I joined Walt Disney, went to work, December 2nd 1935, so obviously, I'm not too young!

I had some connections from the newspapers that I did work with up there, so there was a newspaper publisher in Hollywood, and they promised me work and so on.

His feeling was the name Walt Disney represented all of us. Walt was hanging by his teeth financially and really I think he was for most of his career. Not at all like today.

Drawing is giving a performance; an artist is an actor who is not limited by the body, only by his ability and, perhaps, experience.

Disney had made such a great deal of money on Snow White that the banks gave him the go-ahead on the next three films. But he was heavily dependent on the foreign market.

Before I got through high school I had attended 22 different schools. In the time before I was well acquainted with the latest school, I would amuse myself by drawing and found that I was pretty good at it.

At that time, the people that were in the animated film business were mostly guys who were unsuccessful newspaper cartoonists. In other words, their ability to draw living things was practically nil.

Animation had been done before, but stories were never told.

To give a body and a perfect form to one's thought, this - and only this - is to be an artist.

In the arts the way in which an idea is rendered, and the manner in which it is expressed, is much more important than the idea itself.

If the work is poor, the public taste will soon do it justice. And the author, reaping neither glory nor fortune, will learn by hard experience how to correct his mistakes.

I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait.

Don't bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid.

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.

It is good taste, and good taste alone, that possesses the power to sterilize and is always the first handicap to any creative functioning.

I have Dalinian thought: the one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous.

The only difference between me and a madman is that I'm not mad.

Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.

I seated ugliness on my knee, and almost immediately grew tired of it.

In order to acquire a growing and lasting respect in society, it is a good thing, if you possess great talent, to give, early in your youth, a very hard kick to the right shin of the society that you love. After that, be a snob.

What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust.

Let my enemies devour each other.

Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure - that of being Salvador Dali.

Take me, I am the drug; take me, I am hallucinogenic.

At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.

Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.

The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.