John Kricfalusi Quotes

Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.

Cultural confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition, rather than asking an artist to set his limits.

I love Adult Swim. They give you so much artistic freedom.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

The biggest danger of Hollywood becoming a purely corporate town resides in the creative process.

It just seems like the whole, overall animation world is trying to go where maybe animation doesn't belong.

I think it reflects well on the state of animation that people are knowledgeable about it and love the fantasy and imagination that goes into it.

In America there's no way I can make the kind of movie I like to make.

In order to understand what they need to understand, in order to write what they write, they have to be free. And yet, they aren't ever free. They are not free because they are not free of the constrictions their art puts on them.

I used to teach animation history classes at the University of Texas, and I wrote my master's thesis on cartoons. I just love cartoons.

I like television, but there's not as much freedom as there is in film or theatre, and I always felt that there is a certain pressure in being able to put out a product, but it's OK.

I realised that success and pure creativity are not very compatible. The more successful you become, the more you become a product of something that generates money. Instead of being able to move forward freely and do what you really wish, you find yourself stuck and obliged to repeat yourself and your previous success.

In America, I don't think you have the creative freedom that I'm used to. Traditionally, it's a producer's cinema here.

Self-censorship is the most devastating thing for an artist.

There are some serious limitations in Mo Yan's situation as a writer in China today - just as there are for Jia Zhangke, one of the world's greatest film directors. He can only phrase his dissent obliquely, in his art. Writers in "free" societies labor under no such constraints. They can write more or less whatever they want in both their fiction and their commentary. Yet so many of them look oddly inhibited, even timid, and depressingly a couple of prominent figures actually positioned themselves to the right of their governments, intelligence agencies, and corporations.

I think that limitations are the most important part of any art form

The motion picture made in Hollywood, if it is to create art at all, must do so within such strangling limitations of subject and treatment that it is a blind wonder it ever achieves any distinction beyond the purely mechanical slickness of a glass and chromium bathroom.

I think filmmaking should be a wonderfully free collaborative process, and it so very rarely is. I often see directors as jailers of my talent.

It's true that the human body is more vulnerable than the products of the human mind. We need to protect artists and journalists people to allow them to work.

It would be nice to think that a censor could allow a genuine work of artistic seriousness and ban a titillating piece of sadism, but it would take a miracle to make such a distinction stick.

To think about love and passion and political correctness all together, it doesn't work. Art has to go way past the political to be effective.

In front of the camera and in front of the lens, there's no lawsuits, there's no agent, and there's most frequently no time limits... There's a longevity that's kind of built into it. I spend most of my time behind the scenes, and when it is time to perform, I'm genuinely delighted to do it.

I don't believe in censorship, but I do believe that an artist has to take some moral responsibility for what he or she is putting out there.

You spend most of your time as a director trying to move forward with the movie. It happens on a daily basis, if not more than once a day, that you are struggling with budgetary constraints. Whereas when you're writing, the limitation that you have is your imagination. So it's decidedly non-pragmatic.

If you're someone who's making film or TV or music, or any kind of art form now, there's a billion outlets and they all have an opinion.