I. Frost's Selected Quotations

Everything at Amazon by and about: Walt Disney


The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.
Walt Disney

There's nothing funnier than the human animal.
Walt Disney

We are not trying to entertain the critics. I'll take my chances with the public.
Walt Disney

We allow no geniuses around our Studio.
Walt Disney

I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I have ever known.
Walt Disney

The era we are living in today is a dream of coming true.
Walt Disney

The life and ventures of Mickey Mouse have been closely bound up with my own personal and professional life. He still speaks for me and I still speak for him.
Walt Disney

There is a natural hootchy-kootchy motion to a goldfish.
Walt Disney

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates' loot on Treasure Island and at the bottom of the Spanish Main... and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life.
Walt Disney

We believed in our idea - a family park where parents and children could have fun- together.
Walt Disney

We did it [Disneyland], in the knowledge that most of the people I talked to thought it would be a financial disaster - closed and forgotten within the first year.
Walt Disney

We have created characters and animated them in the dimension of depth, revealing through them to our perturbed world that the things we have in common far outnumber and outweigh those that divide us.
Walt Disney

When you're curious, you find lots of interesting things to do.
Walt Disney

Whenever I go on a ride, I'm always thinking of what's wrong with the thing and how it can be improved.
Walt Disney

You can design and create, and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make the dream a reality.
Walt Disney

You may not realize it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you.
Walt Disney

Your dead if you aim only for kids. Adults are only kids grown up, anyway.
Walt Disney

A man should never neglect his family for business.
Walt Disney

I don't believe in talking down to children. I don't believe in talking down to any certain segment. I like to kind of just talk in a general way to the audience. Children are always reaching.
Walt Disney

I think we are rather indebted to Charlie Chaplin for the idea. We wanted something appealing, and we thought of a tiny bit of a mouse that would have something of the wistfulness of Chaplin- a little fellow trying to do the best he could.
Walt Disney

All cartoon characters and fables must be exaggeration, caricatures. It is the very nature of fantasy and fable.
Walt Disney

All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them.
Walt Disney

Animation can explain whatever the mind of man can conceive. This facility makes it the most versatile and explicit means of communication yet devised for quick mass appreciation.
Walt Disney

Animation offers a medium of story telling and visual entertainment which can bring pleasure and information to people of all ages everywhere in the world.
Walt Disney

Born of necessity, the little fellow [Mickey Mouse] literally freed us of immediate worry. He provided the means for expanding our organization to its present dimensions and for extending the medium cartoon animation towards new entertainment levels. He spelled production liberation for us.
Walt Disney

Disneyland is a show.
Walt Disney

Disneyland is a work of love. We didn't go into Disneyland just with the idea of making money.
Walt Disney

Disneyland is the star, everything else is in the supporting role.
Walt Disney

Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world.
Walt Disney

Crowded classrooms and half-day sessions are a tragic waste of our greatest national resource - the minds of our children.
Walt Disney

He [Mickey Mouse] popped out of my mind onto a drawing pad 20 years ago on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood at a time when business fortunes of my brother Roy and myself were at lowest ebb and disaster seemed right around the corner.
Walt Disney

Here in Florida, we have something special we never enjoyed at Disneyland...the blessing of size. There's enough land here to hold all the ideas and plans we can possibly imagine.
Walt Disney

I am not influenced by the techniques or fashions of any other motion picture company.
Walt Disney

I believe in being an innovator.
Walt Disney

I don't like formal gardens. I like wild nature. It's just the wilderness instinct in me, I guess.
Walt Disney

don't want the public to see the world they live in while they're in the Park (Disneyland). I want to feel they're in another world.
Walt Disney

I have been up against tough competition all my life. I wouldn't know how to get along without it.
Walt Disney

I have no use for people who throw there weight around as celebrities, or for those who fawn over you just because you are famous.
Walt Disney

I never called my work an 'art' It's part of show business, the business of building entertainment.
Walt Disney

I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.
Walt Disney

If you can dream it, you can do it. Always remember that this whole thing was started with a dream and a mouse.
Walt Disney

I try to build a full personality for each of our cartoon characters - to make them personalities.
Walt Disney

It's kind of fun to do the impossible.
Walt Disney

Laughter is America's most important export.
Walt Disney

Mickey Mouse is, to me, a symbol of independence. He was a means to an end.
Walt Disney

Movies can and do have tremendous influence in shaping young lives in the realm of entertainment towards the ideals and objectives of normal adulthood.
Walt Disney

Of all of our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language.
Walt Disney

Our heritage and ideals, our code and standards - the things we live by and teach our children - are preserved or diminished by how freely we exchange ideas and feelings.
Walt Disney

People look at you and me to see what they are supposed to be. And, if we don't disappoint them, maybe, just maybe, they won't disappoint us.
Walt Disney

I only hope that we don't lose sight of one thing - that it was all started by a mouse.
Walt Disney