Quotes from Tim Burton

Danny Elfman, the composer, tells me the only time he thinks I'm happy is when I'm on the scoring stage, and I see the pressure's on him and it's a little off me.

I am not a big technology person. I don't go on the Internet really much at all. Drawing is like a zen thing; it's private, which in this day and age is harder to come by.

And in that one grey hair I saw my whole life and I said "I think I need a hair.

I think of Ray Harryhausen's work - I knew his name before I knew any actor or director's names. His films had an impact on me very early on, probably even more than Disney. I think that's what made me interested in animation: His work.

Anybody who knows me knows I would never read a comic book.

I've found that the people who play villains are the nicest people in the world, and people who play heroes are jerks. It's like people who play villains work out all their problems on screen, and then they're just really wonderful people.

A lot of things you see as a child remain with you... you spend a lot of your life trying to recapture the experience.

I can't remember any dreams in my life. There's so much strange in real life that it often seems like a dream.

I don't look at my films or my old drawings much, so that was an interesting way to kind of reconnect with myself a bit.

If I'd said, 'I'm going to be a director,' it probably wouldn't have happened.

Working on 'Nightmare Before Christmas,' I had endless arguments, like the studio saying, 'You can't have a main character that's got no eyeballs!' 'How is anybody going to feel for somebody with just eyesockets?' You know? So, it's those kind of things that really wear you down.

It's people who you've seen that have given you a lot. In some ways, I felt they helped me psychologically because you see these people up on the screen going through torment and being on the outside, and somehow you relate to them, and it helps you get through life. It's a real honour and pleasure to then meet these people.

I guess I feel so tortured most of the time, when I see someone else feeling tortured, I get a little perverse glee out of it.

There's something about taking a classic movie that people love and doing another version of that, you're setting yourself up for a mistake.

Johnny Depp is somebody I really love working with because he doesn't care how he looks. He wants to become weird characters and I like that.

Things like 'mad as a hatter' or 'grinning like a Cheshire cat', are so powerful that music and songs incorporate the imagery. Writers, artists, illustrators, a lot of them have incorporated that.

The Boy with Nails in His Eyes put up his aluminum tree. It looked pretty strange because he couldn't really see.

One of the things that we were trying to do with this show was the complexities of relationships and love. There is both passion and longing and a bittersweet quality to it that is a part of life.

Anybody who knows me knows I would never read a comic book. And I certainly would never read anything written by Kevin Smith.

One person's crazyness is another person's reality

I think a lot of kids feel alone and slightly isolated and in their own world.

I never saw Frankenstein or King Kong or the Creature from the Black Lagoon as bad guys. They were the good guys.

People say I am stuck in childhood, but it's not that. I remember seeing a Matisse retrospective, and you could see he started out one way, and then he tried something different, and then he seemed to spend his whole life trying to get back to the first thing.

In Hollywood, they think drawn animation doesn't work anymore, computers are the way. They forget that the reason computers are the way is that Pixar makes good movies. So everybody tries to copy Pixar. They're relying too much on the technology and not enough on the artists.