Joseph Barbera's Quotes

My last days at MGM were like the fall of the Roman Empire in fast motion.

My marriage had been impulsive. That marriage should have been short-lived instead of the 23 years it spanned.

Not once in six years did I make it to the office by 9 on the dot.

One of the most attractive things about writing your autobiography is that you're not dead.

What about Mickey Mouse? Disney tried very hard to make him a star. But Mickey Mouse is more of a symbol than a real character.

What the real world of 1941 needed most was the release and relief provided by laughter.

When animators weren't sleeping, they were drinking.

While I have never been a regular churchgoer, I'm anything but immune to the power and the majesty of the religious experience.

You keep pitching. Most of the pitches run wild. A few are caught.

In those days, boxing was very glamorous and romantic. You listened to fights on the radio, and a good announcer made it seem like a contest between gladiators.

Parents look at me like I'm somebody pretty important, and say, We were raised on your characters, and now we're enjoying them all over again with our children.

Ted Turner sailed into the meeting, and I mean sailed. He holds himself as if he were at the helm of his sailboat, in the process of winning the race.

There is no law that says a man who earned a hundred million dollars in his first half-dozen years on the job has to be a decent human being, but Mike Eisner is that and more.

Despite the rejection, and in violation of all the rules, I came back year after year.

Faced with the choice of enduring a bad toothache or going to the dentist, we generally tried to ride out the bad tooth.

I don't know anyone who enjoys going to the hospital. To help remedy this, I got an idea to create what a Laugh Room in the pediatric ward of hospitals.

High-level, big-deal publicity has a way of getting old for me, but what never fails to thrill me is when I make personal appearances.

I learned long ago to accept the fact that not everything I create will see the light of day.

That's what keeps me going: dreaming, inventing, then hoping and dreaming some more in order to keep dreaming.

I first pitched the idea of doing a series of cartoons based on Bible stories. They didn't much like it.

Publicity gets more than a little tiring. You want it, you need it, you crave it, and you're scared as hell when it stops.

After I had done a handful of cartoons I was satisfied with, I started submitting them to the magazines.

Among the great glories of the MGM lot were the vast outdoor sets that had been constructed over the years.

Bill Hanna and I owe an awful lot to television, but we both got our start and built the first phase of our partnership in the movies.

Creating fantasy is a very personal thing, but you can't take the process too personally.

Except for me, no one in my family could draw.