“I had about the biggest, longest wish list anyone could have, and 99 percent of what I wanted to get on the screen we got on the screen within our schedule and within our budget and within our resources.”

Animation is about creating the illusion of life. And you can’t create it if you don’t have one.

We make films that we ourselves would want to see and then hope that other people would want to see it. If you try to analyze audiences or think there’s some sophisticated recipe for success, then I think you are doomed. You’re making it too complicated.

If there are similarities, it’s simply because the same thoughts that occurred to other people also occurred to me. I’d be astonished if anyone could come up with any truly original powers that were at all interesting any more.

I’ve seen Steelheart bleed

Look, it’s a mainstream animated movie, and how often are those considered thought provoking? It’s meant to be a great time at the theater, but it’s also designed to work on more than one level

If you look at a lot of animated movies, they don’t pay attention to how things move through space.

To make something really great and different and interesting means taking risks and following these ideas in your head.

When you assemble animation teams the way you do a live-action film, you’re often struggling a bit to get a cohesive team together, so if you have a team that works well together, you’re hoping for another film so that you can refine the team.

Are there any religions on your list that include the slaughter of noblemen as a holy duty?

I love the way a list makes a big hodgepodge of things simmer down and behave.

Set lists are tough because you come up with this structure of how the songs are going to go from one to the next, but at the same time, you have to be spontaneous and take requests and change the set list at the drop of a hat.

My theory is that, just like with omitting a final comma in a list when not essential for meaning, publishers are trying to save paper and ink or pixels on-screen.

[On being a judge for the 1986 Booker Prize:] I got to the point where I couldn’t read a laundry list without considering it for the Booker Prize.

I’ve been a professor of mathematics at Harvard and at Yale. At Yale for a long time. But I’m not a mathematician only. I’m a professor of physics, of economics, a long list. Each element of this list is normal. The combination of these elements is very rare at best.