So at a time in which the media give the public everything it wants and desires, maybe art should adopt a much more aggressive attitude towards the public. I myself am very much inclined to take this position

I’m a thug. And my thug comes from… my definition of thug comes from half of the street element. Straight street hustling

That’s what I always loved about [Federico] Fellini’s films: You see the weird joy of the weird filmmaking family and the abstract craziness that goes along with it, and there’s something about it that’s quite beautiful.

That’s why I like old monster movie actors, because they transform into different characters or creatures.

Johnny Depp is somebody I really love working with because he doesn’t care how he looks. He wants to become weird characters and I like that.

He can’t fly around tall buildings, or outrun a speeding train, the only talent he seems to have is leaving a nasty stain!

I was very interiorized. I always felt kind of sad.

I’m gonna go live in a cave, just completely live in my interior world.

I remember being forced to go to Sunday school for a number of years, even though my parents were not religious. No one was really religious; it was just the framework. There was no passion for it. No passion for anything. Just a quiet, kind of floaty, kind of semi-oppressive, blank palette that youre living in.

If you ever had that feeling of loneliness, of being an outsider, it never quite leaves you. You can be happy or successful or whatever, but that thing still stays within you.

It’s very nice to have someone that you can have a completely abstract conversation with and leave the room, feel like everything’s fine, and then realize that if you pick it apart, you have absolutely no idea what either of you said

I like actors who like to change and transform to other things.

It’s good as an artist to always remember to see things in a new, weird way.

Don’t worry about how you ‘should’ draw it. Just draw it the way you see it.

It’s like an ‘Alien’ movie. I started crying, it was so emotional … I was there in the room but I wasn’t planning on doing much. But then I see this blue pinhead come out and I think I said to the nurse, ‘What the hell is that?’ And then it turns into this round red thing in seconds. It’s just shocking.

A lot of things you see as a child remain with you you spend a lot of your life trying to recapture the experience.

I am not a big technology person. I don’t go on the Internet really much at all. Drawing is like a Zen thing; it’s private, which in this day and age is harder to come by

Half the fun is plan to plan

And in that one grey hair I saw my whole life and I said “I think I need a hair

Even if you’re doing something that the studio sends you, or something that’s based on a book or story, at the end of it all, you try to make whatever it is your own. This is based on my love of horror movies. Everything is based on something, in some way.

I always felt that Hollywood has a way of making you feel outside.

The problem with film is you never know when you’re going to be able to make a film so you can’t have people waiting around for you. Sometimes it’s fun to work with the same people and work with new people and mix it up

I don’t really dream, I space out during the day – that’s one of my problems wonder off when someone’s talking to me. I can’t remember any dreams in my life. There’s so much strange in real life that it often seems like a dream

For me, fantasy has always been a means of exploring reality: it explores the fact that your internal life, your dreams and the weird images and the things that come to you are things that are actually important tools for dealing with real issues.

That’s why I don’t go on the Internet much – because you can go down a dark hole looking at stuff. Once, I clicked on my name and freaked out. It’s too bizarre, it’s too weird, it’s too unsettling.

That’s the beauty of what you want to achieve as an artist – seeing things in a different way. Kids are constantly saying things that are funny and surprising and their observations are just… you know, they’re like little artists themselves

It’s always an interesting challenge to see if you can create a character that’s got emotion.

I had never really done something that was more of a horror film, and its funny, because those are the kind of movies that I like probably more than any other genre. The script had images in it that I liked

I’m not a big fan of spiders, rats, especially if they’re like – I got up one morning on a holiday recently, and there was a centipede in the bed that big. I wasn’t very happy about that.

I don’t have a dog, because I travel too much. I don’t want to just leave it abandoned.

I always treated the science thing and the art thing as quite similar thematically.

If there’s one thing that looks cool, that’s fine by me. I’m not interested in a whole bunch of stuff.

Adults forget that kids are their own best censors

He liked her cute figure, he thought she was hot. But could a flame ever burn for a match and a stick? It did quite literally; he burned up quick.

I have no idea what happens, but I do respond to other cultures that treat life with a much more positive approach. It teaches – especially when you’re a child – it teaches you to be afraid of everything, you feel like something bad is always going to happen. As to where that other way seems a much more spiritual and positive approach.

I like the challenge of doing things you know that you maybe shouldn’t do.

I try not to go back in retrospect and say oh, I shouldn’t have done this or shouldn’t have done that. You make your decisions and you live by them.

I never sort of really regret anything because you make your choices and I like to stand by them.

Once you get labeled, there’s nothing you can do about it

No matter what you go through with the business side or the Hollywood side at the end of it all, when you are there on the set, it is your thing. So it is your own private world and that’s great. That’s where you have that bubble to create something in.

Things you grew up watching, they just stay with you. They form what you like to do.

Movies you try to work out your issues, then you realize those kinds of traumatic issues just stay with you forever and they just keep reoccurring, and no matter how hard I try to get them out of my head, they just sort of stay there.

I always liked strange characters.

Some people get therapy, some people get to make movies.

My kid is a product of the fast computer lifestyle.

Good morning starshine the earth says hello.

Mr. Smith yelled at the doctor, What have you done to my boy? He’s not flesh and blood, he’s aluminum alloy!” The doctor said gently, What I’m going to say will sound pretty wild. But you’re not the father of this strange looking child. You see, there still is some question about the child’s gender, but we think that its father is a microwave blender.

Nobody had his [Ed Wood’s] style. That’s something I try to do in my films. You have your own kind of cryptic messages in there – cryptic things that most people wouldn’t understand but are important to you. Things that kind of keep you going through the process.

If I had a choice about going to a meeting at a studio or changing a nappy, I’d choose the nappy

Son, are you happy? I don’t mean to pry, but do you dream of Heaven? Have you ever wanted to die?

What I feel that “Alice in Wonderland” did for me and other people in exploring your dream state, and using fantasy in your dream state to deal with real issues and problems in your life. People like to separate those things but the fact is that they are things that are intertwined.

First of all, you make a movie that you want to see and then you just hope for the best.

My name is Jimmy, but my friends just call me the hideous penguin boy.

Unwisely, Santa offered a teddy bear to James, unaware he had been mauled by a grizzly earlier this year.

I don’t know… a regular scientist just was no one

One of the things I loved about the musical was that you listened to the soundtrack and it told you the story.

Technology is technology and then art form and people’s creativity is another thing. Anything that helps an artist do anything – great! Technology for technology sake doesn’t mean much to me anyway.

I always liked making things, and then I fell into animation. And then luck comes into it as well.

If something is not working, then you just fix it.

What I feel that “Alice in Wonderland” did for me and other people in exploring your dream state, and using fantasy in your dream state to deal with real issues and problems in your life. People like to separate those things but the fact is that they are things that are intertwined

First of all, you make a movie that you want to see and then you just hope for the best.

Unwisely, Santa offered a teddy bear to James, unaware he had been mauled by a grizzly earlier this year.

My name is Jimmy, but my friends just call me the hideous penguin boy.

Nobody had his [Ed Wood’s] style. That’s something I try to do in my films. You have your own kind of cryptic messages in there – cryptic things that most people wouldn’t understand but are important to you. Things that kind of keep you going through the process.

Son, are you happy? I don’t mean to pry, but do you dream of Heaven? Have you ever wanted to die?

I am not a dark person and I don’t consider myself dark.

If I had a choice about going to a meeting at a studio or changing a nappy, I’d choose the nappy.

When I was a kid I always wanted to be a mad scientist. I don’t know… a regular scientist just was no one.

Technology is technology and then art form and people’s creativity is another thing. Anything that helps an artist do anything – great! Technology for technology sake doesn’t mean much to me anyway.

Most people say about graveyards: “Oh, it’s just a bunch of dead people. It’s creepy.” But for me, there’s an energy to it that it not creepy, or dark. It has a positive sense to it.

One of the things that we were trying to do with this show was the complexities of relationships and love. There is both passion and longing and a bittersweet quality to it that is a part of life.

One of the things I loved about the musical was that you listened to the soundtrack and it told you the story

It’s really nice to work with people who understand and really love the artistry of building sets, it’s great.

I’m going to put that on my gravestone. “He created such a category of unwanted pop culture – Famous for directing unwanted cultural references

The good thing about animation is that you can affect it. If something is not working, then you just fix it.

I always liked making things, and then I fell into animation. And then luck comes into it as well.

My diagnosis,” he said “for better or worse, is that your son is the result of an old pharaoh’s curse.

I don’t know what it was, maybe the movie theaters in my immediate surrounding neighborhood in Burbank, but I never saw what would be considered A movies.

A journalist in America told us that we’d [with Johhny Depp] been working together for 10 decades, so we’re a lot older than we look! We actually knew each other before the invention of cinema, so we have quite a good, long relationship.

When it comes to art and science, people don’t like a lot of either. Instead of being open to it, they’re closed off about it.

I never really consider myself as a great artist. I just always like to draw

Everything in this room is edible. Even I’m edible. But, that would be called canibalism. It is looked down upon in most societies.

Jack Nicholson is a textbook actor who’s very intuitive. He is absolutely brilliant at going as far as you can go, always pushing to the edge, but still making it seem real

Mummy Boy fell to the ground; he finally was dead. Inside of his head were no candy or prizes, just a few stray beetles of various sizes

I wasn’t a big comic book reader. I always had trouble knowing which box to read next. I was always reading from the wrong box. I was like, this is a comic book that doesn’t make any sense! I think I was reading them all out of sequence.

I worked at Disney many years ago. They just let me sit in a room for a couple of years and draw whatever I wanted to draw, so it’s a very personal thing to me. Drawing and everything you do there is something meaningful and personal.

I’ve found that the people who play villains are the nicest people in the world and people who play heroes are jerks.

There’s something about taking a classic movie that people love and doing another version of that, you’re setting yourself up for a mistake.

It does get very deep and dark for me, and it gets scary at times when I feel I can’t pull out of it. But I don’t consider myself negative-negative. I’m positive-negative.

I always wonder why some people see things as weird and some people don’t.

I have a problem when people say something’s real or not real, or normal or abnormal. The meaning of those words for me is very personal and subjective. I’ve always been confused and never had a clearcut understanding of the meaning of those kinds of words

When we were growing up and saw a Ray Harryhausen movie, we were interested in how it was done. But thank God we got to go through the magic of seeing it before we knew how it was done. You were able to get this beautiful, pure, visceral response to something without knowing too much about it.

And I Jack, the Pumpkin King, have grown so tired of the same old thing.

If you want people to leave you alone then appearing to be crazy is a good thing. If you’re walking down the street talking to yourself people tend to give you a wide berth! But I’ve always been blessed with being easily ignored or avoided. I think maybe it’s because people think I look a little crazy.

I think the thing is that you’re very affected by your early life, and I think that if you ever had that feeling of outsider, or loneliness or whatever, it just doesn’t leave you. You can be happy and successful, whatever, but I think that thing stays inside of you. It doesn’t ever really leave you. You kind of always will have that.

If you ever had a pet, with me it was a dog, with that sort of unconditional love that only dogs can give, people can’t do that; that sort of thing where it’s very powerful, it’s kind of your first love and your first real relationship, and usually your first experience with death

For if someone gets too close to her, the pins stick further in.

And that’s why we’re all interested in movies- those ones that make you feel, you still think about. Because it gave you such an emotional response, it’s actually part of your emotional make-up, in a way

People told me I couldn’t kill Nicholson, so I cast him in two roles and killed him off twice.

The great thing about visual horror films is there’s real potential for strong, beautiful imagery. It’s the one genre that really lends itself to creating strong images. And I’ve always loved that idea of windmills – your mind aimlessly spinning.

I grew up watching monster movies and horror movies, which I felt were like fairy tales and I think this always spoke to me. Something about that is symbolism – the beauty and the magic which helps me work with film and start making modern fairy tales

I am the shadow on the moon at night/Filling your dreams to the brim with fright.

One person’s craziness is another person’s reality

When you don’t have many friends and you don’t have a social life you’re kind of left looking at things, not doing things. There’s a weird freedom in not having people treat you like you’re part of society or where you have to fulfill social relationships.

Live people ignore the strange and unusual. I myself, am strange and unusual