There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Only a mediocre person is always at his best.

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.

One of the most common causes of failure is the habit of quitting when one is overtaken by temporary defeat.

The three dumbest guys I can think of: Charles Lindbergh, Steve Jobs, Winston Churchill. Why? Because any smart person who understood how impossibly arduous were the tasks they had set themselves would have pulled the plug before he even began.

Ignorance and arrogance are the artist and entrepreneur’s indispensable allies. She must be clueless enough to have no idea how difficult her enterprise is going to be—and cocky enough to believe she can pull it off anyway. How do we achieve this state of mind? By staying stupid. By not allowing ourselves to think.

How do we achieve this state of mind? By staying stupid. By not allowing ourselves to think. A child has no trouble believing the unbelievable, nor does the genius or the madman. It’s only you and I, with our big brains and our tiny hearts, who doubt and overthink and hesitate.

No one ever gets talker’s block. No one wakes up in the morning, discovers he has nothing to say, and sits quietly, for days or weeks, until the muse hits, until the moment is right, until all the craziness in his life has died down.

I don’t know how else to make a movie except to try and find some aspect of the experience that I haven’t done before. Because if I’ve done it before, I’m fearless. And I don’t work well when I’m fearless.

I’m not as good a filmmaker if I know exactly what I’m doing every step of the way. But when I don’t have all of my comforts with me, then I get really really insecure, and that insecurity opens me up to possibilities.

I need to get to the set in the morning feeling a little upset to my stomach. If I feel a little bit unsettled, I feel more able to take risks to rescue myself.

Now that I’ve made a Pixar film, a lot of people have asked, “What is the secret formula, as if there’s some magical calculation. May I say, it’s really pretty simple. Everyone here loves films, and they just want to make something that they themselves want to see.

I have learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”