Fantasy isn't just a jolly escape: It's an escape, but into something far more extreme than reality, or normality. It's where things are more beautiful and more wondrous and more terrifying. You move into a world of conflicting extremes.

You know the hardest thing to do in Hollywood is burn bridges. There is usually some sucker who still likes me. There is usually some sucker who will still work with me.

It's the shock of the world if you allow yourself to disconnect from the world and forget it's out there, how noisy it is, how busy it is, how invasive it is.

Invariably, what I'm trying to do is more ambitious than the budget, but we manage to do it somehow.

I was born in 1940 in Minnesota and grew up in the country... dirt roads, swamps, lakes, woods.

I'm a cartoonist, it's what I am at heart, so cartoons take reality and deform it and make it grotesque, you make it funny, but you alter it. If it works, it's based on reality. That's what I try to do.

I thought, how do you confuse violent Russian mobsters? Well, by being silly!