The greatest story commandment is: Make me care.
Use what you know. Draw from it. It doesnt always mean plot or fact. It means capturing a truth from your experiencing it, expressing values you personally feel deep down in your core.
Frankly, there isn't anyone you couldn't learn to love once you've heard their story.
The best stories infuse wonder.
That's what great art does - it inspires other artists to do great art, and that's what it should do.
Change is fundamental in story. If things go static, stories die.
Don't give [the audience] four; give them two plus two.
If you want someone’s attention, whisper.
A strong theme is always running through a well-told story.
A major threshold is passed when you mature enough to acknowledge what drives you, and to take the wheel and steer it.
Drama is anticipation mingled with uncertainty.
I never think about the audience. If someone gives me a marketing report, I throw it away.
In storytelling, the audience actually wants to work for their meal, they just don't want to know that they're doing it.
Loneliness is, I think, people's biggest fear, whether they are conscious of it or not.
We all fall into our habits, our routines, our ruts. They're used quite often, consciously or unconsciously, to avoid living, to avoid doing the messy part of having relationships with other people, of dealing with a person next to us. That's why we can all be in a room on our cell phones and not have to deal with one another.
Art is messy, art is chaos - so you need a system.
I'm a family man, I have kids, and I go to the movies. And I'm just going to make the kind of movie I want to see.
I'm twice as funny, I'm twice as smart, I'm twice as whatever when I'm around other people that challenge me.
Working at Pixar you learn the really honest, hard way of making a great movie, which is to surround yourself with people who are much smarter than you, much more talented than you, and incite constructive criticism; you'll get a much better movie out of it.
There's nothing that you like in this world that wasn't influenced by a bunch of key things; nothing came completely clean out of a vacuum.
No one's going to see my mistakes; I just need the safety of these mistakes to lead me to the right answers.
There's always one sequence in every animated film that's the bane of every animator's existence.
And I'm not anti-sequel, but I just feel like there are very few ideas that are meant to be continued.
I've been a fan of movies longer than anything else. One thing I learned a long time ago is that you can't translate a book literally to the screen. It won't work because it's a different medium. And it would be the same in reverse.
I've always been shocked and waiting-for-the-other-shoe-to-drop that a girl would ever talk to me, let alone want to marry me. They always seem to hold the power to me, and from my mother to my wife to my daughter, every time I try to really figure them out, and think I've got them pegged, I pay for it.
