William Hanna Quotes

In some ways, I feel like the strength of animation is in its simplicity and caricature, and in reduction. It's like an Al Hirschfeld caricature, where he'll use, like, three lines, and he'll capture the likeness of someone so strongly that it looks more like them than a photograph. I think animation has that same power of reduction.

As a cartoonist, I'm a caricaturist. First you find out what somebody really looks like, and then you find out what they 'really' look like.

The best portraits are those in which there is a slight mixture of caricature.

When I draw my caricature self-portrait, I always do a huge smile.

What I aspire to is to have the viewer look directly at the subject, as if they're looking through a window at the real thing.

I think a painting is more like the real world if it's made out the real world.

I've been interested in cartooning all my life. I read the comics as a kid, and I did cartoons for high school publications - the newspaper and yearbook and soon. In college, I got interested in political cartooning and did political cartoons.

The only principle in art is to copy what you see. Dealers in aesthetics to the contrary, every other method is fatal.

I was never really an impressionist. If there was somebody within my range, maybe I could work on it and do a little exaggeration of them - which I think is really the way to do an impression.

Fortunately, cartooning is not a job. It's something like eating or sleeping.

Universities are filled with poets and novelists conducting demure and careful lives in imitation of Eliot and Forster and those others who (through what seems to be have been discretion) made it.

The art of drawing is the art of omission.

What does it mean for a painter to paint in the manner of So-and-So or to actually imitate someone else? What's wrong with that? On the contrary, it's a good idea. You should constantly try to paint like someone else. But the thing is, you can't! You would like to. You try. But it turns out to be a botch... And it's at the very moment you make a botch of it that you're yourself.

Art comes out of art; it begins with imitation, often in the form of parody, and it's in the process of imitating the voice of others that one comes to learn the sound of one's own.

It was so simple to paint things as I saw them; to put without special calculation a red close to a blue.

The practice of photography is no longer a means for recording reality. Instead, it has become reality itself

A painter must not only be of necessity an imitator of the works of nature... but he must be as necessarily an imitator of the works of other painters. This appears more humiliating, but is equally true; and no man can be an artist, whatever he may suppose, upon any other terms.

I am interested in making up a good case for distortion, as I am coming to believe it is the only way to make people see.

I was trying. I was crawling. I was coming into myself. I was trying to in some ways get beyond - what is the word that I'm looking for? - metaphorical language in painting, and to create something that was more indexical. And what I mean by that is that when you go to the library there's an index card that refers to a book that's actual and real in the world. So that index relates to something real.

One must be of one's time and paint what one sees.

To demand the portrait that will be a complete portrait of a person is as futile as to demand that a motion picture be condensed into a single still.

I can only draw what I see.

Photographs have always been the tar baby of censors and obscenity laws. Literature can certainly (if it's any good) conjure up the most pornographic imagination. But photographs dare to be real. No matter how contrived or constructed they are, there's that damn body staring you in the face.

Since photography gives us every guarantee of exactitude that we could desire (they really believe that, the mad fools !), then photography and art are the same thing.

A portrait is a picture in which there is just a tiny little something not quite right about the mouth.