Quotes from Jim Henson

I think if you study--if you learn too much of what others have done, you may tend to take the same direction as everybody else.

NBC was trying to convert all of their local programming to color right away to encourage the sale of the sets, so I barely remember working in black and white, although I do know that I did do it, but there was not a major difference, though.

When I was a kid, I never saw a puppet show. I never played with puppets or had any interest in them.

Well, Detroit Institute is kind of a key - probably the largest permanent collection of puppets in the US.

You're assisting the audience to understand; you're giving them a bridge or an access. And if you don't give them that, if you keep it more abstract, it's almost more pure. It's a cooler thing.

I was very interested in theatre, mostly in stage design. I did a little bit of acting.

If you're doing a large, complicated character with radio controls, it might take a number of people several months to make it and if you're talking about a quick little hand puppet, it could be made in 2 days, so there's enormous range there, and no real easy generalities.

I've never felt any sense of competition with anybody, and we're all friends; we're all good friends.

It has always been difficult to get Big Bird to be very pretty. Big Bird in England is much more gorgeous.

No time is wasted time

I think there are lots of ways of leading very good lives and growing spiritually. This process of growth goes on whether we believe it or not.

Please watch out for each other and love and forgive everybody. It's a good life, enjoy it.

Only time can heal your broken heart. Just as only time can heal his broken arms and legs.

Nobody creates a fad. It just happens. People love going along with the idea of a beautiful pig. It's like a conspiracy.

But with The Dark Crystal, instead of puppetry we're trying to go toward a sense of realism - toward a reality of creatures that are actually alive and we're mixing up puppetry and all kinds of other techniques.

A film is not done by one person. It's done by a lot of people. I love this whole collaborative aspect. When it works well, you end up with something better than any of us started out to do.

It's a wonderful life and I love it.

Yeah, I did some small parts in high school and the first year of college and then fairly soon thereafter I settled into the backstage scenery, and then at the University of Maryland I was doing posters for their productions.

Yeah, well when I first started working, it was $5 a show; it was probably a little higher by the time I got to my own show, but I remember that they put me under contract at $100 a week, which to me was really an astronomical price.

Yeah, I think we did the term Muppets before we got the show Sam and Friends - a few months after I started working.

Yeah, we pretty much had a form and a shape by that time - a style - and I think one of the advantages of not having any relationship to any other puppeteer was that it gave me a reason to put those together myself for the needs of television.

It's into the same bag as E.T. and Yoda, wherein you're trying to create something that people will actually believe, but it's not so much a symbol of the thing, but you're trying to do the thing itself.

When I was young, my ambition was to be one of the people who made a difference in this world. My hope is to leave the world a little better for having been there.

The most sophisticated people I know - inside they are all children.