Stephen Hillenburg Quotes

What I love about Goofy is the flesh on his cheeks. You can almost feel it.

A sponge is a funny animal to center a show on. At first, I drew a few natural sponges - amorphous shapes, blobs - which was the correct thing to do biologically as a marine science teacher. Then I drew a square sponge, and it looked so funny.

I knew I wanted to create a character who was nerdy and kind of square, so when I drew a square sponge, everything came together. And originally his name was SpongeBoy, but there we couldn't use that for trademark reasons.

I've done the voice for the Hulk for the animated cartoon.

I'm a huge fan of Warner Brothers cartoons. I would spend many hours alone after school watching Daffy Duck. I think Daffy Duck is one of the great comedic villains.

I'm the Nickelodeon version of DangerMouse.

Creating characters is like throwing together ingredients for a recipe. I take characteristics I like and dislike in real people I know, or know of, and use them to embellish and define characters.

I don't base any character on a real person, and really don't do composites either. I make them up.

Making cartoons means very hard work at every step of the way, but creating a successful cartoon character is the hardest work of all.

'Allen Gregory' came about because we wanted an animated show and we were just tossing around some ideas about me playing a 7-year-old. We thought that would be cool, because we couldn't do that in real life.

'The Simpsons' is an especially collaborative show.

I eventually thought of SpongeBob, but he needed a last name - SquarePants came to mind.

I love 'America Dad' and 'Family Guy.'

I find that using real people as models keeps me from getting too formulaic in the designs of characters.

To do a 75-minute movie about SpongeBob wanting to make some jellyfish jelly would be a mistake, I think.

If you were to draw Bugs, the easiest way is to learn how to draw a carrot and then hook a rabbit onto it

I sometimes use some personality traits to fashion part of a character. Most of my characters are composites of either people I know or people in the public eye.

I studied a lot of Foghorn Leghorn.

I wrote on a show called Johnny Bravo when I was at Hanna-Barbera and he guest-starred as himself.

I'm in a Road Runner cartoon, Sinclair. And I'm the coyote.

With these Funny or Die videos, I do everything for them. I write them, act in them, and co-direct them with my buddy Brian McGinn, who I grew up with. We also edit them together. We're working on a small scale of Internet videos, but we're slowly trying to make them become a bigger thing.

Stand-up comedy had an interesting effect on me in terms of how I started to think about constructing things, because I really loved the interstices, the linkages, or lack thereof.

Yes! I'm the slowest comic-book writer on Earth.

When you're doing standup you're kind of doing, "Hey. I thought of this. This may be funny.

Writing is the great skill, the creative skill. The acting is more an interpretative skill. And the thrill for me is the moment when I think of something. And then the challenge is how to get that funny idea to work in terms of the structure and that kind of thing, which is - and that's what I really love doing.