Quotes from Pete Docter

Yeah, to bring families together I need to go away.

As a director, nobody told me I'd be talking to people all day. I'm naturally reclusive - I feel myself peek out at a certain point and go, 'All the extrovert in me is done! I'm on reserve!'

Little kids definitely have desires and jealousy. There are some emotions that don't show up at birth, but by three or four, they are all there.

I kind of feel like... I have a slower instinct than most live-action directors, but I have more patience.

There's that bubble of childhood that makes you innocently do anything. Then, when you get older, that pops, and you're aware of limitations and judgment and social pressures and things like that.

Back in the days before the Internet, there was no place to put a short film, so Mike Gribble and Spike Decker had this festival of animation. My student films got selected.

When I was in fifth grade - so, about 11 - my folks moved us to Denmark. And so not only did I have all new friends and all new surroundings, I didn't even understand what they were talking about, which was very difficult and kind of started me, I think, on my path to animation.

Walt Disney wasn't making films for kids. Neither were the Muppets. A lot of the great, really cool films, they weren't making them for kids.

There was a guy that I got to know pretty well - Joe Grant. He was one of the creators of Dumbo and worked side-by-side with Disney. Being a total Disney nerd, I was obsessed with asking him questions. He was 92 when I got to know him.

I don't think of 'Monsters, Inc.' as existing in the same space as Carl Frederickson from 'Up,' or whatever, you know? They seem like completely different universes to me.

I love to go to the airports and just put on, like, dark glasses, so nobody can tell I'm staring at them, and just draw people.

I think, in Japan, animation isn't relegated to being a genre unto itself. It's just a medium by which you can tell any number of stories, be it horror or action or adventure or drama or whatever, and we're trying to do that as well. Every film that you go see from Pixar, we're hoping is a little bit of a surprise.

It's weird - on almost every film I've worked on, the first sequence we storyboard ends up being the first sequence that goes into animation, and ends up being almost shot-for-shot the same.

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.

I always feel like if you have a smaller crew, you can not only get to know the individual strengths of people more specifically, but then, you also give them a longer runway to be able to apply the knowledge that they have learned to subsequent work.

There's no way for me to anticipate what people will like or not like.

The way we work at Pixar is we write the script, but then we quickly move on into story reel, which is basically like a comic-book version of the film. And then we do our own dialogue and music and sound effects, all in an effort to be able to basically sit in the theater and watch the movie before we shoot it, essentially.

My father was working on his Ph.D. on Danish choral music - the Danish choral music of Carl Nielsen - so over there to do research.

And as I was sort of doodling, I was thinking, surprise and fear - probably fairly similar so let's just lose surprise. And that left us with five.