A man should never neglect his family for business.
I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I have ever known.
The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.
When you’re curious, you find lots of interesting things to do.
Disneyland is the star, everything else is in the supporting role.
I do not like to repeat successes, I like to go on to other things.
All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them.
Mickey Mouse is, to me, a symbol of independence. He was a means to an end.
You’re dead if you aim only for kids. Adults are only kids grown up, anyway.
There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate’s loot on Treasure Island.
We are not trying to entertain the critics. I’ll take my chances with the public.
I am not influenced by the techniques or fashions of any other motion picture company.
When you believe in a thing, believe in it all the way, implicitly and unquestionable.
The more you like yourself, the less you are like anyone else, which makes you unique.
I only hope that we don’t lose sight of one thing – that it was all started by a mouse.
We believed in our idea – a family park where parents and children could have fun – together.
Disneyland is a work of love. We didn’t go into Disneyland just with the idea of making money.
I don’t like formal gardens. I like wild nature. It’s just the wilderness instinct in me, I guess.
I try to build a full personality for each of our cartoon characters – to make them personalities.
Times and conditions change so rapidly that we must keep our aim constantly focused on the future.
I have been up against tough competition all my life. I wouldn’t know how to get along without it.
I never called my work an ‘art’. It’s part of show business, the business of building entertainment.
Whenever I go on a ride, I’m always thinking of what’s wrong with the thing and how it can be improved.
When people laugh at Mickey Mouse, it’s because he’s so human; and that is the secret of his popularity.
All the adversity I’ve had in my life, all my troubles and obstacles, have strengthened me. You may not realize it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you.
Of all of our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language.
Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world.
All cartoon characters and fables must be exaggeration, caricatures. It is the very nature of fantasy and fable.
I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate people and hope they were entertained.
I’d say it’s been my biggest problem all my life… it’s money. It takes a lot of money to make these dreams come true.
I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.
Crowded classrooms and half-day sessions are a tragic waste of our greatest national resource – the minds of our children.
You can design and create, and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make the dream a reality.
Of all the things I’ve done, the most vital is coordinating those who work with me and aiming their efforts at a certain goal.
We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.
People still think of me as a cartoonist, but the only thing I lift a pen or pencil for these days is to sign a contract, a check, or an autograph.
I started, actually, to make my first animated cartoon in 1920. Of course, they were very crude things then and I used sort of little puppet things.
Movies can and do have tremendous influence in shaping young lives in the realm of entertainment towards the ideals and objectives of normal adulthood.
Animation offers a medium of story telling and visual entertainment which can bring pleasure and information to people of all ages everywhere in the world.
We did it Disneyland, in the knowledge that most of the people I talked to thought it would be a financial disaster – closed and forgotten within the first year.
Or heritage and ideals, our code and standards – the things we live by and teach our children – are preserved or diminished by how freely we exchange ideas and feelings.
Animation can explain whatever the mind of man can conceive. This facility makes it the most versatile and explicit means of communication yet devised for quick mass appreciation.
It’s no secret that we were sticking just about every nickel we had on the chance that people would really be interested in something totally new and unique in the field of entertainment.
We have created characters and animated them in the dimension of depth, revealing through them to our perturbed world that the things we have in common far outnumber and outweigh those that divide us.
Animation is different from other parts. Its language is the language of caricature. Our most difficult job was to develop the cartoon’s unnatural but seemingly natural anatomy for humans and animals.
Mickey Mouse popped out of my mind onto a drawing pad 20 years ago on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood at a time when business fortunes of my brother Roy and myself were at lowest ebb and disaster seemed right around the corner.
I have no use for people who throw their weight around as celebrities, or for those who fawn over you just because you are famous.
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